


O World of Many Worlds

by horsecrazy



Series: The Originals [10]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:24:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 93,155
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4479173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/horsecrazy/pseuds/horsecrazy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>10th entry in an ongoing Au Originals series. Klaroline</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: A quick note about the reference to a Killarney farm as Tim's childhood home, because in the New Orleans flashback that takes place in the eighth one-shot, he tells Kol he's from Kerry: Kerry is a county in Ireland, Killarney one of its towns. It's not a slight retconning of his past; he just gave Kol the county rather than town when talking about where he was from. Also, I mentioned this way back in the fourth one-shot, but as I'm sure no one remembers that far back (or at least specific terminology from it), 'peeler' is a term for a police officer. Also, there are a few references to suicide in this one-shot. Just a warning for anyone who finds that sort of thing triggering. I think I've forgotten to warn for that before, since immortals are always getting bored and finding new, creative ways to kill themselves.
> 
> 'You might say Man was born, it may be, in God's image, or Earth, perhaps, so newly separated from the old fire of Heaven, still retained some seed of the celestial force which fashioned Gods out of living clay and running water. All other animals look downward; Man, alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.' This is a (very slightly paraphrased) quote from Rolfe Humphries' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, book one, 'The Creation'.
> 
> I've borrowed the title from another of Wilfred Owen's poems.

So January yields its teeth to a soft February, fuzzy round the edges with sun, and him in his cap and work boots, same as the ones the good Lord birthed him for back in 1891 when his da cast the humble die of his future with that bleak Killarney farm.

He takes them to quite a few heads, these good work boots of leather heel and steel toe.

Kol took the play from his second eldest brother when he vanished for lands unknown, and so it's time for the pussy to quit her batting about of the mouse and get on with its death, which is the only thing saving the taxes which must be got on with, so here and he goes with his cap and his recovering heart along the sidewalks busy with peeler and soldier, gun in his pocket, orders still fresh in his ear.

The newest wolf with his end in a circle on his forehead he finds already fled this mortal plane, stepped off a stool and swung himself to death on a rafter, and so he stands looking up at this heavy pendulum swaying there on the southern breeze finding its way in through a window open on a winter's eve, because why the Christ not, in this soggy desert of a land.

Leapt off his own stool in a barn way out the bunghole end of County Cork, 1920.

Nothing tormented about it, sure and he'd lost his friend who showed him the humor rather than the blight of his new station in life, but you can't be following him off down that river of the Greeks, put you on your back with the stupidity of it, not a third decade under your belt and you've given it up, then, Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan, and anyway, if he's making an honest man of himself he's to admit that he wanted, like all the lads of his age in all the wars of the world, to live. Oh, he wanted to live.

But the boys dropping dead all round him with their British bullets and him like a statue of the king, untouched by it all?

It was just a curiosity, left him deader than that cat with its fatal curiosity, but he came round with some of his own men whispering underneath him, because oh, wasn't it a shame, quiet thing but with a trigger finger like stone, not a bad sort, and maybe and they regretted those underhanded jokes that cut the poor boyo up, you could tell by his face even if he gave his hands something to do with that cap of his he never did take off and he laughed bright as you pleased.

So he hung there with the noose about him, and how lonely it was, to draw this line in the sand, the brave men with death's jaws open to receive them and they plunging in after their freedom all the same, and the men like himself with no consequences for their cause and no arms waiting to bundle them up into God's embrace where he'd soothe all the bumps and scrapes of this imperfect world He filled with his imperfect creatures.

It wasn't a very hard decision to eat them.

Funny how they drew their own lines between themselves and the English who were themselves still supposedly creations of the Lord, declared their very blood and their bones of a different make, and imagine the shock of them, to find it sure as fuck him up the ass tasted all the same.

He wasn't so lonely then, with the men bloating him to the beltline, a piece of them all carried off into the soft April rains.

That little bit of companionship digests quickly, though, and then off with you into your hayloft where you bed down beside another rebel shivering with night and fear, and this loss of a friend weighing on your shoulders and the bullets somewhere off in the distance coming down but never on you, and the rebel beside you in the hay long enough without woman or warmth that he only freezes and then shudders when you press yourself to him, stiff with memory, and you fetch him off almost to completion, and then it's all clumsy desperation at that point, hands on your hips and prick up your ass like the little  _queer_ you are, you get told shakily when the rebel has wiped off his sin and done up his trousers, and so you push him out of the hayloft and you listen to his neck break, not because he's cast something like that at you,  _queer's_ just a little pebble in the handful you've got dashed in your face, but rather he didn't kiss your neck or call you something like his 'little Irish cupcake' till you were both sick with laughter-

And there you are, crying in your hayloft, with the bullets still striking all the boys who are not you.

He can't tell you how angry he is, thinking of that wretched man in his hayloft who'd have given anything to have back his friend.

Eejit of the worst order, sending him off like that, and with barely a fucking good-bye, Christ and the goddamn  _cowardice_ of him.

But it wasn't him what chased off Kol Mikaelson in the first place, his fucking shitstain of a brother managed that all his own, and don't we all know the stupidity of raw rage, so don't judge his brain on this mild gray day of mid-February, when he turns on one of his own team mates, a pivotal lackey of the boss', and he eats him down to the bone.

Three of them he eats, actually.

And snatch one of the military's trucks,  _Timmy_ , never know when it might come in handy, says the handler of his leash, so indeed he gets his hands on one, and he arranges in the driver's seat the remains of one of these lackeys whose face is now a little worse for the wear, and he crashes the whole fucking lot of them into that bloody  _fucking_ Hotel Monteleone that started it all.

What a scramble he has to make for the cover-up of it.

Klaus eyes him suspiciously anyway, because there is not much you can put past thousand-year-old eyes, but perhaps he's held his spine straight enough, because he emerges all in one piece.

But he hasn't escaped much unscathed, he finds in the end, for it's little sharp Caroline who is to accompany him on his next outing.

* * *

They're to snatch the peelers' armored personnel carrier on this drizzly afternoon, and as he's not so stupid as his temper tantrum of two days previous would suggest, he sets the two of them up on a cautious stake out, to wait for the garage to empty rather than make their frontal assault on a force that might well be armed with ammunition to kill, directly or no, for if Klaus' girlfriend gets the boot from this life, sure and it'll be his stupid Mick ass following right along behind, and then how to reach that far-away Kerry with his friend and that tomb waiting on him?

She keeps up a steady hum of companionship, this slight little thing. Tried to ignore him at first, he could see her wrestle with the struggle of it, but there's some can't help the chatter, so off and away she goes in his ear, and if he'd thought to pinch a larger car, that'd have been just fucking grand of him.

"Ok, you are seriously creeping me out. You're like Evil Henchman Number Two in The Godfather. You know, the one who just stands there not saying a word, which, he doesn't really need to, because you know he's there to be all…evisceratey, so who needs him to talk, cheesy I-shall-be-your-doom monologues are for straight-to-DVD, but it's still really kind of weird, because this isn't a movie, so could you please say something?"

"Something," he says, adjusting his revolver with a grimace; fucker's got its sights into his hip, and it's not at all the sort of poke a man wants after a streak of loneliness not pacified by his hand.

She eyes him from the front seat where she has lain herself down, curls like a halo round her, and if and it wouldn't unman him, he might admit he nearly swallows his tongue, getting the jab as he does from her gaze.

"It does speak. And it jokes."

Ladies should be neither cursed nor ignored his ma taught him, but the nerves the queer delicate little things set to shaking inside him, which maybe is why he settles for a dick up the ass or in the mouth seven times out of ten, because a man at least he knows somewhat how to broach but a woman is quite another island altogether, and him just paddling round the sea lost in its froth, trying to fumble his way to shore.

Also, he hears tale that on the same night of his own almost successful death sentence, this one was nearly shot to death, and still she ripped a man's testicles clean from round his pecker, and perhaps even ate them with a smile, it's whispered among the shadows, and if the Catholic shade of that old Tim still hovering round inside him thinks he uses his own for all the wrong reasons, still the boy wouldn't wish that on even the man who had to make three attempts at one of those strange underground parties of London's sinners with the men in skirts and corsets before he crossed the threshold and let queers more bold than he undo his trousers and have their go at him, two at a time.

She must be waiting for some kind of rejoinder, of course she must, surrounded as she is by those Original siblings who have a retort for all, and so he squints up from beneath his cap, to the rain pearling on the windows, and he tries to think of something.

But with the shyness like a hole in him and the words slipping about like eels, never a one caught up in his hands, he does as he often will, wets his lips, looks away, and how that bastard ever pries up the wit he can hear in his own head but never bring to his tongue he couldn't tell you.

Sheer superiority, he can hear Kol insist clear as though he puts those words right to his ear, and oh he misses the fucker.

It's worse than the pain of his fingers digging those bullets from lung and heart, for the length of it, and the ache of it, bedding down each night with him when he lays his head in a different spot, because what are men like him to do, but keep uprooting themselves when they have just found their place?

"Kol said something like that once," he says long after it's appropriate to respond, the air thick with the awkwardness of his timing, and she looks back to him once more, letting go the fingernail she has been picking at.

She hesitates for three more full moments. "So, do you…like him?"

Mary and Joseph; sure and he'll just be talking prick preferences while he submits to have his nails done up in cosmetic and gives a solemn listen to the attributes of all the celebrity sweethearts she carries round in her wallet and kisses before her bedtime.

"It's ok. My dad was gay. And if Kol's your thing, then that means Klaus isn't.'

He looks up at the roof of the car.

"Do you think he'll come back?" Caroline asks.

Well, now, a regret isn't really something you can get back, now is it? Whole point of it's the slip of it between your fingers, and the flopping round on the bank before it splashes away into the sea, and you standing round cursing your rod and tackle because there's not a cast fast enough in your supernatural fingers to reel it in again.

But your boyfriend's a poisonous sort, he learned that the hard way, and no pun intended for the implication of that, so if Kol has to pursue his happiness somewhere the other fuckin' side of the world, then it's not just biblical love of a man he's added to his sins he supposes, because though his throat tightens with thought of it, he's not about to begrudge the man his better life though he passed up his place in it.

If he had…if he had a friend who didn't shut up his throat with fear of them, he might tell them this.

But you know, they all tiptoe away, time, friends, the wars with their distractions bursting in the grass.

"I think he's gone."

And the thrust of that in his chest- he couldn't tell you.

The rain starts to really bang away at the windows now, maybe demanding to be let in, it's that angry, but it fills the silence between them, because either she's finally stopped up that motor mouth of hers or the nerves have got her too, for she's trying to take careful little peeks over the wheel and toward the garage, her curls sticking out a little haphazardly from where she has lain on them.

"So are we actually going to do anything, or are we just going to sit here all day?"

And we've felled the blow he's been expecting all along.

He's happened upon the organizational skills of this woman a time or two, with his hat pulled down and his shoulders slunk into himself so he might flee a wrath scares even his Lord Fuckhead, if he's not mistaken, and even a peripheral shot is enough to stagger a man, so to have the full force of it turned upon him- Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he knows he's long flouted your favor, but if you could not keep him from temptation, at least deliver him from evil, for his ma was such a good woman, pious to the bone, God bless her, and himself innocent as the first snow, till the brothers Mikaelson got hold of him.

"Well?"

He wets his lips, and darts his eyes nervously toward her. "We're waiting for the garage to clear out; then we'll sneak our way in."

"Why don't we just go now?"

"Ah, I dunno. Just a feeling in me gut, that they're not going to be keen on just handing over their lorries."

"Ok, look. I don't want to be a bitch here, but we're not friends, and having recently gotten in touch with my burgeoning amorality, I might eat you, because I may be blonde, but sarcasm does not go over my head, and  _hello_. We have a little thing called compulsion that says, yes, actually, they will be keen on just handing over their 'lorries' if we want them too."

"And if there's the mechanic and the whole lot of them in there, armed to the fuckin' nuts, you think you can work your way round to all of them before someone opens fire, and some of them probably with their blood full of vervain?" he snaps, and then he realizes his slip, and he rattles off his apology for his language, because if he's a monster it's still no excuse for bad manners.

She sits up. "Do you have a gun?"

"Yeah."

"Give it to me."

"And why would I do that?"

"So that if I'm in the process of eating one person, I can shoot another if they try and rush me, or stake me, or kill me in any other type of manner."

"I don't think so. If you walk in there and get your head shot off, Klaus'll have mine next."

"Ok, but people like me do not just sit around waiting for things to happen. They make plans. They take action. They do not sit in cars with boys who screwed their boyfriends and then tried to come back for seconds while they were already in a relationship, which is a really shitty thing to do, by the way."

"Are you thinking I want another go at him?"

"I'm thinking you've been staring an awful lot at his  _penis_ , for someone who's not trying to get in it."

"That's not how gay sex works."

"I  _meant_ for someone not trying to get in his pants, ok? I didn't get a lot of sleep last night. Just give me your gun, and I'll take care of this." She holds out her hand expectantly.

And for some reason his sanity just flees him, maybe it's his grief and the hole it makes in him, hollowing out a place for all manner of things to grow, but the worst of it this anger eating him away like the rains erasing the landmarks of his home, and in no man did heartache birth such great idiocy, for he swings his legs out of the way and he yanks down one of the cushions so that he can reach back into the dark space of the trunk and unearth the shotgun he has stored there.

And then, stupid fucker he is, he shoves it into the hands of this girl who will earn him a very long death, one curl on her head gets carried off with the winging of the bullets sure to fly, and he pushes past her into the driver's seat.

He flips down the visor and catches the keys that drop with a jingle.

"What are you doing?"

He leans across to roll down her window, giving the handle on the door a crank to nearly tear it from its moorings, his jaw tight.

"What are you  _doing_?" she demands again, and into the ignition go the keys, touch of the pedal and he revs the engine, shifts the stick into first, jerks the wheel away from the curb to jolt them into the street, scraping the bumper of the Datsun he has snugged himself in behind.

"Oh my  _God_!" she shrieks as he short shifts his way up into third and he floors the pedal, aiming the nose of the car for the door of the garage.

Flimsy aluminum thing, the door is, and it crumbles grandly when he hits it, and if her grand Ladyship isn't any first pick of his, she's no idiot, for she flings herself over as there is that sudden chatter of a gun startled into the fight, and then she awkwardly pumps the shotgun in that cramped little space and edges the barrel out the window, to skim a good return shot off the skull of their first assailant.

He brakes abruptly.

Her head puts a star in the windshield.

He opens the door and blurs himself round to the bonnet of the car and its burden of aluminum before she can turn the shotgun on him.

The mechanic gets his wrench to the head.

The officer who unsnaps his holster and draws with shaking hand takes a Long Colt to the throat.

Caroline swings open her own door and crouches behind it as some unseen corner of the garage lets off a long stream of return fire.

He snatches a pipe off the workbench and into the temple of a peeler who gets a lucky shot into his shoulder it goes, all the way through to the other side, the skull yielding like sponge cake, blood spraying, brain spattering, the wet crunch of it a bloody bomb in his ears, Caroline up beside him now, to lend her assistance to him or his attackers, he's not sure, but there she goes, off with those soft hands and sleek hair of hers, and now that unseen corner goes silent as a distant alarm takes up its shriek from within the station.

"Good job!" she snaps.

Must have been a pair lingering somewhere right near the door, because they nudge it open and take the offensive at a crouch, hugging the walls as away with their Glocks up round their ears they go, looking for their shot.

He shoots them both in the head.

"Could you  _stop_!"

And certainly the sickness of asylums has got hold of him, because he puts his boot on the throat of the mechanic still gurgling away at life though that wrench gave him a blow to demolish half his face, and he fires another two rounds into his chest.

"Get in the truck. Now," she says coldly.

Into the APC they go, then.

She seats herself at the wheel.

"The fuck are you  _doin'_?" he blurts out.

"Well, I thought instead of sitting around waiting to be arrested and possibly murdered by the hoard of SWAT team members you brought down on us instead of letting me sweet talk my way into having the thing just  _handed_ to us, that we'd be on our way."

"You don't know how to drive this thing!"

"Well, there's a thing here that turns, when I pull on it? And something else, that I can push with my foot? I thought I'd start there," she tells him, and though there's a bit of fumbling round for a moment, something clicks into place, for the thing gives a lurch that flings him across the long cushioned bench on the right.

They shoot backwards across three lanes of traffic, the tires squealing in the damp, horns blaring all around, and him cursing just as his dear departed mother always told him not to round a lady, hanging for his dear undead life onto the back of a seat that takes his nails to the frame.

"Close the back doors, you idiot!"

A blast of wind takes his cap from his head.

Some forgotten rucksack slithers along the floor and tumbles away out the back, into the windshield of a Ferrari that swerves into the backend of an idling Plymouth.

They slew round a corner so hard the momentum shakes him loose from the chair and nearly throws him face first into the opposite seat.

"Do you drive your mother's Lamborghini like this, then?" he snaps, throwing himself into the seat and bracing his boots on the bench across from him.

"Do  _not_ talk to me like I'm some spoiled little rich brat. My mom is a cop. She works with people like the ones we just killed. She  _is_ like the people we just killed," she yells over her shoulder, and through one of the little side windows he watches a very red traffic light flash past.

It shuts his mouth on this bravery of the battlefield that for one sweeping moment does away with his awkwardness.

He forgets the youth of her, surrounded as she is by old men and women crumbling in spirit if not in bone.

He was but a lad once, full to his brim with blood and tears and the strange sexuality that suffuses a man once he has joined death and is drawn to every aspect of it, the smell and the sight and the taste of it doing horrible things to his prick aching with the throb of it, and no one to let off the steam but a man even worse than the boy called Tim O'Sullivan, who is neither here nor there anymore, but shut away down deep in a place permanent as the tomb they slid his poor mother into, to wait for that summer emancipation of flesh from bone.

He'll just be keeping his mouth shut for all the ride to the old fort where they are to store the lorry, then.

* * *

Klaus is amused, if anything, at the drama of their escape, although Elijah will so totally probably get his super expensive silk designer whatever boxers up his ass over it, but that's not for her to worry about, he can take that up with Klaus, who surfaces only rarely from this broody asshole mood Kol cemented when he fled for parts unknown, and anyway, like it's  _her_ fault that Klaus employs total  _whack jobs_ who kill officers with hair like her mother's.

But she doesn't tell on him.

She doesn't know why, but for some reason she adjusts her story just slightly, she makes her voice just indignant enough to suggest Tim was uppity, she almost ate him, but she can't dig down into the real life-threatening _stupidity_ of it because in his voice was this utter bleakness when he spoke of Kol, and she knows the holes from which voices like that are reeled, and how they feel, and the way they never close.

Isn't that something?

That she would spare a man she doesn't even like from Klaus' wrath, because he's in love, because he's hurting with it?

She can hold onto something like that, can't she?

* * *

"And then I was Flower #3 in Johnson Elementary's springtime production of 'Mary Had a Little Lamb'. Flower #2 was just awful, brought the whole cast down, so I ate him. Little bastard won't be missing his cue to shimmy his stalk round to stage  _right_ again, I can assure you that."

The witch seated across from him blinks just a little.

He blinks back, pleasant smile still in place.

"We're going to need some kind of assurance that you won't just turn right around and stab us in the back as soon as you leave here. Your kind's not exactly trustworthy."

"Well, that's a little racist, don't you think? How would you like it if I said that I needed some kind of assurance that you wouldn't make me commute to work on a broom and tarnish my stunning fashion sense with one of those pointy hats you people are always donning?"

"We're not just going to blindly trust you."

"You know, I came out to have a good time, and I am honestly feeling so attacked right now."

She stares blankly at him.

"Well, someone hasn't been keeping up on their internet memes."

"Yeah, I've been busy, trying to keep my sisters and I hidden from your brother," she snaps.

Speaking of.

He broadens his smile. "I can give you the names of Nik's most important players, and where you can be sure to find them. Is that enough to satisfy you, or did you want something else you may have cast your eye on and can't be faulted for coveting?"

* * *

Klaus is out more often than not, getting his hands dirty, Rebekah tells her, so, fine, if he wants to murder away his pain, the two of them are just going to sit here and be a couple of girls, which is so totally never something she thought she'd undertake with  _Rebekah Mikaelson_ of all people, but she does a mean winged eyeliner, and she has all these utterly fabulous impressions of her brothers she whips out when she is just a little tipsy with the bourbon they steal from the stash Klaus thinks he has cleverly hidden under his bed, and on nights when the house is devoid of boys, they're actually quite idiotic, dancing around to Icona Pop once a little of that stolen bourbon oils some of the head bitch snob from Rebekah's joints, the furniture a little worse the wear for their drunken antics, one of Elijah's favorite couches picking up a hole the size of her fist, courtesy of an enthusiastic heel, and so they giggle their way through a cushion flip that Rebekah points out Elijah will spot in a moment, and then they break into one of the locked rooms that turns out is some weirdo shrine to all these antique pocket watches, Nik has them all arranged alphabetically, by victim name, Rebekah explains in that so-much-posher-than-you accent of hers, and opens one of the cases.

"Let's piss him off!" she declares way too loudly, pumping her fist in the air.

"Would you shut your mouth? He's going to hear you halfway across the city, you twit."

"Sorry!" she screams, and then she giggles like it's the funniest thing she's ever said, and Rebekah gives her two of the watches to stuff down her bra and scoops another few into her hand, and down slams the lid, shivering the remaining watches in their velvet perches.

"I feel like I have these, like…wonder robot boobs."

"What in the hell are you talking about, Caroline?"

"Ok, so one of them has slid down my bra right over my nipple, right? Like, I don't know- it's some kind of futuristic robot gun thingy that  _no one_ would ever see coming, because boobs are supposed to be good. Pew pew," she mimes, aiming her left breast at Rebekah.

There is this moment of silence, and then suddenly Rebekah leans her hands onto her knees and lets loose with a laugh that sends tears just freaking  _gushing_ down her cheeks.

* * *

Klaus is a quick one, give the man a candy, because just two days later he storms into the living room where she and Rebekah are arguing over Jennifer Lawrence's Oscar dress and leans his shoulder against the wall, both his eyebrows raised, little bitch face firmly in place.

"I'm missing an 1897 Elgin, a 1917 Hamilton, a 1927 Hampden, and two Waltham's, an 1860 and an 1895. Care to tell me where they might, perhaps, have walked themselves off to?  _Rebekah_?"

"Pew pew," Caroline says, and they both begin to cry with their own wit.

He throws up his hands. "Perhaps another thousand years will illuminate the mystery that is women," he snaps, and vanishes up the stairs to his studio.

"Why do men always hang the top half of their underwear out their pants? Like I want to know if you're wearing laundry day granny's or I'm-getting-laid silk, unless I make it absolutely explicit that I want to see which it is, by taking off your pants."

"It's because Nik's got a behind like a carrot stick. Nothing to hold them up."

"He does have kind of a flat butt."

"Yeah, he's always been like that. Kol's got the bum, Elijah the legs, Nik the propensity for whining that some women might mistake for sensitivity. Together they're the perfect man."

Somewhere in the house, a door slams.

Rebekah smiles. "Want to hear about the time he tried to break his first horse and got a kick to the testicles, right in front of the girl he fancied?"

"Obviously."

* * *

If Time and all its trenches with the boys sunk helplessly in their young graves rolls itself tirelessly onward with no shifting of the backdrop, one must lend the scenery a touch of their own polish now and again.

The youngest Salvatore would of course color it with a bit of that moony woe that is the affliction of heroes everywhere, the chains of the centuries, the dragging of the lusts, we bear our sins as Atlas carried the heavens, etc. etc., but you can't approach it like that, mate.

What sort of name does a man make for himself like that?

So here you shall find him, where live all things consigned to the shadows, wearing February's sharp darkness as a king shoulders his mantle, one leg slung over his chair, head tilted casually back against the rest, hand dangling carelessly across the arm.

You might say Man was born, it may be, in God's image, or Earth, perhaps, so newly separated from the old fire of Heaven, still retained some seed of the celestial force which fashioned Gods out of living clay and running water. All other animals look downward; Man, alone, erect, can raise his face toward Heaven.

But there is none whose face is warmed so closely by these cinders of the civilizations of deities than he who has plummeted from their depths and risen again with his broken wings in ashy smudges round the blades.

You'll forgive him the effrontery.

But if God is to take no hand in these proceedings of years and yearnings, then is it not the task of the monster, this union of animal and man, the one with his gaze to the muck, the other with his eyes kept skinned for the clouds, to straddle his throne of divinity?

Shouldn't have left the children behind to break and to be in turn broken by the things they do not understand, now should you have, mate?

For instance.

The crunching of faraway tires on this winter bed of gravel and ice.

Take those.

Just lend them your ear for a quick moment.

What you hear amidst this swishing of rubber and the pops of these small rocks, bits of ice, unfortunate house pets with their senses not so attuned as his, is the very small keening of what has never been anything other than a very small thing among those great co-conspirators of Time and Death.

Man is not so very unlike his beastly inferiors after all.

But he has evolved beyond this rude union of living clay and running water, and so like a god he waits for them who will take always to bended knee before Creations of his might, and he smiles.

These faraway tires make their transference from pavement to grass, and he keeps his chin down, tapping his fingers along the hand-carved arm.

Tim marches her mute and hobbling along the passageway of mingled dirt and snow to where he sits in the center chamber, and the boy tosses her down before this- he won't venture the conceit of labeling it a 'throne', but if, perhaps, you would go so far…? -chair in which he slouches, like the offering she is.

She is red to her throat with the blood from her mouth.

He deepens his dimples. "My apologies for the bit of rough and tumble, love. Can't have you throwing round spells, though, can we? That wouldn't be safe for my friend here. Tim," he says jovially, not lifting his eyes from the woman. "You did bring an alternative to verbal interrogation, I hope?"

The lad tosses him a notepad and pen.

He catches them one-handed. "Thank you. You're dismissed."

He waits until the woman stops crying and the tires have reversed themselves back onto the pavement.

"Now, sweetheart." He leans forward with his hands laced patiently on the notepad. "I understand you're in a lot of pain at the moment," he tells her sympathetically. "So I want you to just do the best you can, give me information as best you can, foggy though it may be."

She wipes her eyes.

Such a useless thing, these little rivulets of grief meant to stir mercy in the hearts of predators.

But, there, there; he's not heartless, you know.

Bit withered round the edges, perhaps.

"My brother Kol. Where is he?"

He passes her the notepad.

She flips the cover shakily and scratches out a trembly answer.

**I HAVE NO IDEA.**

"But he's here. That's what I'm driving at, love. He's here, and at least one of you is working with him."

**WE'RE NOT.**

He loses the smile.

"Come now. Your attacks on my people have increased exponentially in the last few weeks. You know precisely where and who to strike. In fact, just recently, a terribly tragic nightclub fire took ten of them together. My brother's a bit of a fire bug, you know. I'm sure you do. You're telling me that, having slunk round the city with your tail between your legs for the past month, you've suddenly gained yourselves a foothold with no outside help?"

**WE DON'T WORK WITH VAMPIRES. YOUR BROTHER ISN'T WITH US.**

"That's three times you've lied to my face," he says calmly, and breaks her left elbow.

Interesting, the screams of a mute.

Horrible gurgling sound.

Might be a nice recording to soothe him off to his dreams. Sleep is often a bit of a slippery thing, with so much meandering round in his skull. Not but an eye flutter away from your black peace when up pops Sherrington's findings on split brain phenomena, and off you go with recent representationalist theories on the symbolisms of the brain's little wanderings.

"Let's try that again. Kol is lurking where, precisely?"

**HE'S NOT I SWEAR TO GOD PLEASE HE'S NOT WITH US I CAN'T HELP YOU PLEASE**

"So you're saying he's just gone."

But he doesn't  _accept_ that.

He watched his brother smolder for three  _days_  and he wasn't even allowed a touch of his hair as he got to at least stroke poor Henrik's death-soaked locks, and he can't- he hasn't-

You don't understand.

He can't have just left.

He has failed his family in every which way it is possible to disappoint those who always take your letdowns hardest, with every stroke of which love is capable, but Kol- he-

He just-

He bore it differently.

Everything slid away, because how else was this youngest surviving Mikaelson to live outside the circle he had to chalk round his less tolerant siblings, for whose love he always had to strive, noble Elijah, royal Rebekah, always with that thin bit of  _something_ between them that Kol never did put up, Kol who in 1102 told him, "It's all right, Nik" when he was still wallowing rather than reveling, and slung his arm round his shoulders and asked with that hint of a smile in his voice whether he ought not to braid his hair and send him round to the village boys to see who preferred his ladies bristly, and if history occasionally carried them off in different directions, he to the New World, Kol at a brisk trot for Africa, always they met up at some confluence of century and country full of smiles and stories.

For a thousand years he has finished what Mother started, and dashed himself to ruin against the love of anything that threatens to hold steady.

"That's unfortunate for you, sweetheart," he says tonelessly.

She tries to gather her feet beneath her, to breathe her exertion in gusty red, to break for the faraway opening that will carry her onto the lawn of the fort where the imprint of Damon Salvatore's broken corpse is not long smoothed over by time.

He lets her struggle up off a knee, scrape together both of her boots, take to her heels in this soggy mud with the color stolen from it by winter, fighting her all the way, one of her shoes left behind in the morass, her heart just frantically going, poor frightened little thing.

He stands.

He crushes the notepad into the mud when he swings that casually arranged leg down from the chair arm.

He takes up no more than a brisk walk, hardly a thing to get the wind up in even the lungs of the young human Niklaus, trading off blows with the stick he took to arms against his young apprentice with dirt all over that little dimple in his chin, until the end of that bout he of course didn't throw, having lost fair and square to his superior opponent, and he must bend over with his hands to his knees, and the sweltering summer in his nose, everything gone thin in his throat, his conqueror swinging from his neck.

You didn't know him.

The either of them, really.

But the elder though he lost touch with everything else carried at least his love into his new life, and then time, neuroses, whatever the bloody  _hell_ is wrong with him, it didn't take it from him, you can't have lost it, when you're fair choked on the whole bloody mess of it, but certainly it seems that way to the boy who once fancied him a God, as are all big brothers who sit up scaring away monsters.

He slams the witch's head into one of the walls, and watches that strange transference of insides to outsides, very like a painting or two he has done in his time, with its splatters taken from all over the palette.

So you just left him, brother?

There isn't-

There isn't one last bit of forgiveness to be scooped up from anywhere?

Please?

* * *

He takes his lighter to his fag, and shakes the sting from his hand where the flame's taken just a nip from it.

Makes the hair on his fuckin' arms stand up, it does, to listen to Klaus give himself over to fond memories of his Spanish Inquisition days, or whatever it is has taught him to pull the screams from a man like that.

There's the bit of cherry at the end of his fag and not much else this night, with the moon hidden away as she is, and the fog like those wisps of the fey folk he used to watch from the sanctuary of Yeats' dusty old volumes.

Touch wood it isn't him next for those medieval instruments he watched the boss take out with a relish as they cornered some new young thing from Marcel's dwindling numbers.

Caught more than a look or two passed his way, and that smile once would have meant a long night in the sheets, but it's not his prick Klaus is sizing up with that long look of his, it's his throat he's already got his hands round in his mind's eye, you can practically see the fuckin' reflection of it, you can, the fucker's a right goddamn nutter, steeped as he is in his grief.

He puts his hands in his pockets and tongues the fag nervously from one cheek to the other.

Put the poor fuckin' thing down and be done with it, nothing to be got from drawing it out, but of course he doesn't say that, think he's just going to offer himself for the noose like that, better to dust off old Mrs. McClary puttering on away down the damp Sligo roads with her pram and its perpetually enraged pug with the bonnet snug round its ears or one of the boys from the university, right, weren't they a bunch-

Fuck him for a fuckin' shithead and a caffler, stab the fucker through the heart and be god bloody fucking  _done_ with it.

Not his soft heart shivering in pity, so and it's clear.

Enough Catholic left in him to know a lie for a sin and to offer it up in confession. In the interest of unburdening his immortal soul, for all the good it'll do him, let the record show that one Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan once ate his way out of an awkward social situation (three pairs of eyes on him and not a beer to his name, tried a joke, bungled it worse than that one little faux pas where he thought the Reverend Colm was hinting round the unsavory part of the 'friendship' between man and man, had his belt half undone before the significance set into them both; ate him too), and twice in one Sunday did he take the Lord's name in vain while on his knees in front of Father Blake, who was in fact talking about a different wick when he suggested the lighting of the votive stand.

It's just the goddamned  _sound_ of it.

Puts a man's shoulders up to his ears.

He pulls nervously away at his fag, flicks the ash of it into the grass.

Going to bring the whole lot of the peelers and the soldiers down on them.

Not that his Royal Shitbag has put a thought to that, he's sure.

Time for a change of the nappy, is it, you whingeing fucker? Oughtn't to have chased your brother out like the shitstain on the trousers of this world you are, maybe, do you perhaps think?

Not that he's bitter or anything.

Oh, no, plenty content he is, having just got the man back and all and now him off and away somewhere in the world plying his charms on some Russian ballerina or Chinese copper.

Not jealous either.

He flicks another bit of ash into the grass.

Fuck whoever he likes.

Maybe fall for a few of them, because whatever he wants the world to believe, nothing dead inside about him, can't doubt his capacity for a moment, when you see that smile, not that bit of frill and froth he uses as a sort of wallpaper, but the real one, with the eyes in on the game and everything.

"Perk up, Timmy," Klaus says suddenly in his ear, and he startles and drops his fag in the grass and smudges it out with the toe of his boot, swallowing the knot from his throat.

Klaus claps him on the shoulder. "Consider yourself dismissed for the night. Take yourself out somewhere nice. Pick yourself up something handsome." He leans in close, smiling. "Make sure he's got that little cleft in the chin. You wouldn't want some nice, smooth little thing ruining the illusion."

And fuck yourself sideways over a table without so much as a gob of spit.

* * *

He is away at his murder five days out of seven, and on the sixth Caroline steps into his room as he bends over his sketchpad, hands behind her back.

"Ooh- brooding artist. Original."

He flicks a little look up at her, his charcoal pausing for only a moment. "Not in the mood, love."

She takes a step forward anyway, because apparently in her presence it's always himself he's nattering away at, never would any of it, perhaps, be directed at her, so he sets down his charcoal with a sigh and folds his hands with a mockingly attentive lift of his eyebrow. "Do you need my help with something, Caroline?"

"I brought someone for you."

"Blonde or brunette? Or a redhead, perhaps? Got to get a bit of variety into the diet."

"Well, unless you want to eat Stefan, I suggest you keep it in your mouth."

"So you've dragged Stefan round to roust me from-"

"Your hermit hole? Yes."

He spreads his hands. "I'd hardly label it a 'hole', love."

"Well, whatever you want to call it, you're moping in it, and I'm tired of it. I just spent like an hour and three mocha lattes on talking Stefan around to coming over with me, so come downstairs and be boyfriends with him, because he's lonely and still heartbroken, and you're lonely and still heartbroken, and this is like the opening to every romance movie ever, where the protagonists make their way all broken into one another's arms and emerge totally healed by the power of love and the side of cheese with their dialogue."

He drops his head and starts to laugh.

"I know. I'm really funny." She flashes across the room to grasp him by the wrist. "Come on."

"I'd prefer to be alone, for the moment."

"Nope, no- not gonna' happen. You're going to come downstairs, and you and Rebekah and Stefan and me are all gonna' get so drunk that Elijah throws out his back, he winces so hard at what complete and total asses we are making of ourselves."

He pulls his wrist out of her hand, but his smile is not unkind.

She lets out a frustrated breath and crosses her arms. "Klaus."

"Caroline." His smile turns just a bit genuine at the look she gives him.

She cocks her hip out to one side and plants a hand on it. "Kol's gone, and that sucks, and I know you're hurt, but you are just going to have to wait for him to forgive you, and next time, you have to do better. You have to give people a reason not to leave. Love is not unconditional, ok? It shouldn't be. There are conditions. You have to treat people like  _people_. Like people you love. You can't bribe them, or threaten them, or…hold the people they care about over their heads like bargaining chips."

"Then how do I get them to stay at all?" he asks, directing the question to his hands.

"But then that's obligation, not love. Is that what you want? Is that the only reason you want them staying?"

"I just want them to stay," he says, and he didn't mean it to leak out of him with quite so much rawness.

He looks up at her.

She sighs but her hand is very gentle as she takes it to his curls and she runs it back through them, and acquainted as he is with time and all its limitations and parameters and strange little illusions, still he thinks to himself that somewhere there must be some great trick of a God he doesn't believe in that can stall this moment just a bit.

"Well, you're not going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself because you're a jerk," she tells him, and he lets her pull him to his feet.

She thunders down the stairs at such a pace she nearly dislodges his arm from its socket, tugging as she does on his wrist, and from Stefan he only gets a helpless lift of the hands and from Bekah a dismissive eye roll, and then the girls set to work fiddling away at the iPod docking station Kol nicked from some store or another, the little device still in its slot.

"Oh my God, he has Beyoncé's 'Single Ladies' on here?" Caroline blurts out.

"Yes; he had a whole dance made up to it. You missed that particular Mikaelson family trauma," Rebekah replies, handing a bottle of bourbon to Stefan and another to him. "Hold these.  _Don't_ drink them yet."

"Do you remember the dance?"

"Let's just leave it, shall we, Caroline?" he puts in, uncorking his bottle and tossing back a nice swig though the look his sister cuts him is enough to wither a lesser man where he stands.

He takes another drink without looking away from her.

"What Nik means is Kol compelled himself several back-up dancers, then while they were flailing around in the background, he hopped up on Nik's back and started slapping his behind like he was some sort of pony, whilst yelling, "Ain't no other man, so if you liked it then you shoulda' put a ring on it!" at the top of his lungs. And here's Nik trying to fling him off, because of course Kol's ruining his image in front of these back-up dancers Kol specifically compelled to  _not_ forget the most powerful man in the world being ridden across his living room like a common stock horse, and in the end Nik had to break his legs, because Kol had his arms flung out to either side for the finale and his legs round Nik's waist, singing his stupid head off, so then even despite that he's still sort of flapping there, and the back-up dancers are still going, and Elijah walks in and then just walks straight back out. Nik had to eat all the back-up dancers."

"Wait- he opened with 'ain't no other man'? You don't  _cross-pollinate_ Christina Aguilera with Beyoncé! That is a complete insult. To Christina, I mean."

"I know, right? The audacity of comparing one electronically-enhanced, Hollywood-generated smokescreen who will always depend upon the gnat whims of the lowest common denominator to another," he points out, and takes another drink.

"Shut up, snob. Besides, Christina Aguilera can actually sing. Have you ever even heard her live?"

"Yes, love. I often troll the pits of common pop artists. The mass thwarting of a thousand bedtimes really streamlines the difficulty of a quick grab-and-go."

That one at least gets a laugh out of Stefan, though for his undeniable wit or the affronted look on Caroline's face, he won't venture a guess, though he does lean heavily to the former, for who doesn't appreciate the turn of a good phrase now and again, even at the expense of maintaining one's heroic gloom?

He doesn't want to brag, of course, but there are some men just too funny to resist.

After all.

Punsters deserve to be drawn and quoted.

He opens his mouth to share this bit of brilliance, smiling already to himself and giving a quick look to Stefan, who if not exactly turned toward him, neither has he shifted away, and Caroline points sternly at him.

" _No_."

"What? I didn't say anything."

"He was about to tell a pun," she explains to Stefan, who has leaned forward with his hands clasped between his knees and both eyebrows lifted.

"You can't possibly know that, Caroline."

"Oh my God, I can practically  _smell_ them on you."

"It's true," Bekah puts in. "You can always tell by the look on his face."

"Yeah; it's kind of this maniacal, twisted combination of 'I'm so creepily enamored of myself you should probably turn away because I'm about to have a moment' and 'God I am so funny and brilliant and just everything here are my feet you may lick them now'."

"So, just his regular face then?" Stefan asks.

"No; there's a subtle difference in the depth of his dimples," Rebekah replies, and jabs him in the cheek.

He makes a face up at her, and always the sweetest smile before the sharpest poke, his sister, and so he should well have anticipated some bit of violence from perhaps the most easily-riled of them all, but still her backhand carries him off the arm of the couch and into the crouch he nearly doesn't land, bottle unharmed in his hand. "What the  _hell_ was that for?" he roars.

"That's for chasing off my brother."

He puts himself nose to nose with her. "Well isn't that a bit rich, Bekah, coming from you. Your relationship with Kol was of course so seamless that surely his leaving without you was only some oversight on his part, isn't that right?"

"I'm not the one who welcomed him back from the dead by showing him that he better not love anyone but me, or else. I'd like to stick your head in the toilet right now. And hold it there till your feet stop kicking," she spits, and grabs him by the hair.

"Maybe if you psychos just talked your issues out once in a while, instead of murdering one another into temporary compliance, you'd get a lot farther with each other."

"Nobody asked for your input, Caroline!" Rebekah snaps, giving his head a yank to uproot his scalp.

"Let go of me."

"Make me, Nik."

"Oh my  _God_ , would you both  _stop_? You're a  _thousand_.  _Each_. That's two thousand years of experience between the two of you, and I just think that maybe, somewhere in all of that, you can probably conjure up some kind of solution that doesn't involve pulling hair and blowing raspberries."

"Actually, it's about one thousand and nine hundred years or so, between the two of us, if we exclude that little stretch of time where my own dear, sweet brother stuffed me in a coffin and left me to rot for decades."

"I think it's about time we got over that, don't you?"

"Let me work through it myself, Nik," she says cheerfully, and gives him such a jerk he drops his bottle.

Stefan catches it deftly, and puts his feet up on the table before him.

"Get your feet down, Salvatore. We don't conduct ourselves like  _peasants_ in this house. Except Nik."

He snaps off the heel of her right shoe with a blinding dart of his boot.

She bends down to remove the other, still clutching him to the roots, and twice she spikes him in the temple with this little javelin, then once more for good measure, he supposes, bloody Salvatore drinking casually, Caroline scowling at them both, and now Bekah twists his arm behind his back and puts him face first into the cushion of Elijah's pristine leather arm chair, the one he's quite fussily particular about, and he feels her knee press itself down with force enough to crack his spine. "Say you're a tit. And you're sorry. And also that I look pretty today."

"And me too," Caroline calls out.

He throws her off.

She gets hold of his hair again, bites his hand, elbows a hairline fracture through his collarbone, and when at last he has her arms bound up behind her, she whips her head back right into his nose, and sends up a plume of blood that paints her hair to the crown.

He just stands for a moment, wrestling his anger back under control, because Kol's absence is quite enough a jab, Rebekah's flight will surely do him in.

Bekah dusts her hands when he releases her.

Caroline taps her heels together just a bit awkwardly, just for a moment, and then she punctures this silence she never could quite stand. "Ok, does anyone want to, like, get a snack or something? Because I don't know about you guys, but I'm really hungry, and there's that really great new-"

"Go find Kol, you ass."

"He doesn't want to be found."

"Like that's ever stopped you before, Nik. In fact, I always thought it was just that much more an impetus for you. The more they want to stray, the tighter he winds his leash."

"Perhaps I've learned a thing or two, in the last century," he says bitterly, and mopping up the last of this fountain coloring him to the chin, he blurs back up the stairs to his room.

* * *

Of course he still looks for him, in every face he dissects.

A family like them- they do not merely pass unnoticed into the roil and toil of time, there is nothing unremarkable about these footsteps they sculpt the earth to fit, they will never fade away as so many fall to their nameless white epigraphs.

So of course his brother left impression on some pliable young thing who turned round to watch him pass.

Of course his brother did not put up his hands and wash them clean of ten black lifetimes he let besmirch but never drown him.

Of course there is somewhere in this city a trail of bread crumbs he pretended not to leave.

Of course he fled a very long way, to put between tormentor and tormented the crumbling mold of a thousand bygone eras, to find again what it means to breathe the recycled lives of European ants, to stretch his legs and to throw out his arms as neither Death nor brother would allow him.

Of course.

And, of course, he's coming back.

Isn't he?

Well, mate.

If you haven't an answer to that, of what use are you?

He slits the throat of the werewolf who lies leaking beneath him, tears, snot, blood, the whole lot of him with the tap left open, Tim silently off to the side where he belongs, good lad, and the February air in through his coat like a knife.

He tips his head to one side, watching this last gurgling claw for life. "Why was the werewolf arrested in the butcher's shop?" he asks tonelessly.

"What?"

Kol'd have got that.

Going to have to be faster on the draw, Timmy.

He takes the boy by the throat and slams him down beside this unfortunate man with his bowels slackened for the final journey, pinning him on his back. "Why was the werewolf arrested in the butcher's shop?"

He tries to make himself so small, poor boy, flattening himself into the grass, breath rattling in his throat.

"I don't know."

"Come now, Timothy, give it a guess."

He touches Tim's cheek gently with the back of his finger. Not so soft as Caroline's of course, he's nothing for a razor to turn tail at but still there's a bit of scruff spattered about among all the blood, prickliest he's ever seen him, in fact, melancholy got your shaving kit, mate?

He smiles. "I don't think he's coming back for you. Do you?"

He just breathes, the stiff little thing.

"He won't come back. Not for someone like you. Who he left behind. Who one day he will forget all about. You're a very inconsequential thing. You always have been, Timothy."

He strokes the back of his finger one more time across the slope of the boy's cheek, very gently, and then he punches his hand down into the very meat of him, all the way to his heart.

He was getting tired of him anyway.

* * *

Father Kinney's lopsided smile finds him in the back pew, and then he's after snuffing the candles, and devoted he is to the particular task, never a man so given to his chore, which might be on account of last month's communion of robe and flame, as passionate a coupling as ever he did see in all his years, but that's an edge of gossip to it, so he'll just be leaving off with the tidbit about the scandalized parishioner who rushed to the saving of the poor man just a second too late, and found out the hard way about an old man's bits and bobs, which must be left free to air the age from them, as once was explained to him.

Stripped off his whole feckin' robe and stood beating it on the altar, with poor Mrs. Bengley's eyes out farther than her breasts.

And him laughing in the back pew till he nearly put his lunch all over the bench, but begging his pardon, Father, didn't even notice your plight, it was just his reading, you see, Mr. Dickens conspiring to make the ass out of him with this very unfortunate confluence of wit and troubles.

It's the least of his sins, sitting here with  _David Copperfield_ open on his knees and his smile bent to the pages, so the poor old fucker won't recognize in it the jaunty little replay of his Jimmy, as one of the IRA boys used to call it, flapping itself about with more energy than it'd probably seen in, oh, must surely be a good hundred years or so.

If God's waiting round to put the lightning bolt to him it won't be so petty a thing as this what puts the final nail in his damnation, so he gives his shoulders over to the shakes for a good couple of minutes.

You might guess he's here to bow his head to the miracle that surely is that last second letting up on his heart, Klaus in him to the elbow and no reason to be otherwise, with his brother gone and a city at his bidding, but let go he did, and left him in that grass with the moonlight and blood in peppermint stripes over a dead man's shit, and his own heart still rattling somehow in his chest.

But actually he comes here three days of the week with some novel or other in his hand, Dickens being a favorite but Hugo with a foothold in his heart nearly as firm, and you wouldn't need the authority of some cheap-inked degree out the back of a van to gather it's the convergence of right side up boyo with the Mass memorialized in his heart and the remnants still right side up, if his friend's any expert in which part of a man ought to be sticking up.

Well and either way he spent quite some time on his knees in this church.

He's pretty sure it still counts.

If he's to find his peace in the memories of some long dusty affair that just so happened to feature a front like his own, it's not for any judgment his ma always said was going to strike him down someday, he didn't chew with his mouth closed.

Didn't create him, but didn't stop the creation of him, either.

Can't turn Your back and then spin round to shake Your finger when it's suiting Your own prejudice.

So anyway.

He thanks You if You'd anything to do with that little reprieve Klaus granted him yesterday.

But he's thinking You're probably gone.

Most things are.

Oh, he could shake his fist at it.

He could point out, he  _prayed_ , you bastard, and then he could bar the doors and seal himself inside with news of his friend's death and the teeming of the dozen or so lost souls groping about for their forgiveness, and he could take particular delight in screaming himself hoarse over their bleating, were any of them thinking He was going to tip so much as a divine eye to their fates, then, shriek yourselves blue in the fuckin' faces,  _he's not listening_ , don't you  _understand_ -

But he's not so young as that anymore.

So Father Kinney finishes the killing off of the candles and slinks back away into wherever it is old men like him sprout from, giving him a wave, and he puts his feet up on the pew in front of him and settles into Davey's miserable little childhood, and ah, well, poor fecker, don't give it a thought, the old man will be dust before you know it, and when the electric lights go the way of that one lingering invention of caveman, he reads on with eyes that aren't bothered a bit.

Dickens could have molded a fair bit from this, the faithless boy with the century-old heart and the twenty-one-year-old cheeks, pulling his friends from his books.

Can't get away from you, those ones.

Always rifle yourself back to a place where they're alive, and happy, and they didn't end, and they never will.

All the readers in all the world, whiling away their loneliness at the end of some other fucker's pen.

And this some other fucker bleeding it down to the nib, and watching it soak away into the margins, and thinking to his poor old self, let him have touched some transatlantic soul in his foreign bed, let all the goddamned soot and stink of him be relieved in this strange companionship of traded isolations.

And him and the other faithless of the far and wide Godless planet, wondering why He chooses not to look.

* * *

She is walking alone along one nearly-empty street somewhere over by Bourbon, when suddenly she is just lifted up off her feet, and jerked roughly back into the shadows.

But you know  _what_ ,last time this ended in two mutilated testicles she likes to think all the king's testicle donors and all the king's surgeons couldn't have possibly put back together again, so she's just going to go for broke, and by that she means your penis.

She kicks her foot up behind her, driving the heel along inseam toward groin, and another rough jerk puts enough space between them to spoil her aim, and then back again she is pressed against a chest that she is so totally going to  _shred_ , just as soon as she gets free.

"Ah, ah, ah," someone says in her ear, and two arms slip around her own, pinning them to her sides. "I heard that story. Did you really eat them afterward?"

" _What_?"

"That man's testicles. The story goes you ripped them off and then ate them, but I feel like that last is the little embellishment that rumor always does pick up somewhere along the way."

"Why don't you let me go so you can find out?"

The arms tighten around her. "I will if you can guess who I am."

"Ok, well, let's see. There's just that right edge of entitled, affected  _ass_ in your voice, so I smell a Mikaelson." She rolls her eyes. "Also, I recognize your voice. Kol."

The arms loosen and she is spun gently about by the shoulders, until Kol Mikaelson brings them face to face, his hair tousled, stubble a little thicker than last she saw him, smile just as eternally douchey as his big brother's.

"If you're back, then march straight home, and, I don't know, beat, murder,  _whatever_ , your way back into each other's black and shriveled hearts."

He crosses his arms and leans his hip against the wall at his back. "You're very bossy, for someone all alone with a man who was single-handedly responsible for the downfall of the Knights Templar, and who has plenty of reason to do something just terrible to Nik's favorite plaything."

"First of all, not Klaus' 'plaything', and if that's what he's calling me behind my back, I will take him by the  _nostrils_ and-"

"Relax, darling. My phrase, not Nik's."

"Fine.  _Any_ way, you're not here to eat me, so let's just drop the vague threats and get to the part where you put something gross in Klaus' shoes, or whatever worldly, experienced, sophisticated people do when they're working out their differences in a way befitting totally mature, really old-ass adults."

"I sense a bit of sarcasm, darling."

"Klaus and Rebekah settled their last fight by pulling each other's hair and biting one another."

He scrunches up his nose a little. "Mostly Bekah, I'm guessing. She likes to pull Nik round by his hair when he gets uppity. Did she put him in the toilet?"

"She threatened to."

"Well, he got off lightly, then. He tends to do that," he says, and there is a jagged edge of bitterness in his voice for just a moment before he smoothes it back over with his way too freakily-focused smile. "Anyway, you're right- I'm not here to eat you. I have a trade to make."

"A trade."

"I know what my brothers are up to. Nik's being a megalomaniacal prick; Elijah's keeping him in line. Sort of. Well, the illusion's nice for him, anyway." He wets his lips, and looks away for just a moment. "But I was wondering if you could just…tell me what my sister's doing with herself."

It hurts to watch him smile his way through this. "We had a bit of a spat before I died. I think she's used up her forgiveness for me. I did stretch it a very long ways, after all."

"Why don't you just…talk to them?"

He runs a hand down his chin, and clears his throat. "That's not how things work in our family, darling. Anyway, if you keep me up-to-date on whatever domestic dramas are afoot in the Mikaelson clan, in exchange for both your information and your silence, I'll tell you nine hundred years worth of embarrassing stories about Nik."

She crosses her arms. "Give me an example."

"Once in Vatican City, Nik and I were having this priest at the same time-"

"Ok, no. I don't want to hear about how creepily comfortable the two of you are with one another. I really just do not want to know what all you've…put in where, or who, especially if, like, maybe you got curious one time and you were bored and you figured you've done a lot of really bad stuff, so it's not like some Caligula/Drusilla relationship was really so much worse-"

"It wasn't like that, darling. I was sucking his cock while Nik was-"

"Still don't want to know!" she yells, bringing a hand to her forehead. "Sometimes people practice this thing called restraint? It's really great."

"Anyway, so I was sucking his cock while Nik was slipping him a-"

"Yes! Yes, I will tell you every little thing they spend each insignificant moment of their day doing, down to the brand of  _toothpaste_ they are using, in exchange for nothing, if you just stop. If you stop now, right now, and don't finish that sentence."

"Well, I just feel like that's a little unfair. This is supposed to be a quid pro quo, darling."

"I'll live," she assures him, unfolding her arms to slip both hands into her pockets, her huff going white against the sky.

"I've still got all that horrible erotic poetry Nik wrote when he was a teenager."

She cocks her head. "How bad is it?"

He smiles.

He looks just as young as he is supposed to be, when it reaches his eyes. "Have you ever read  _Fifty Shades of Grey_?"

"Yes."

"She's Tolstoy, in comparison. And not the watered-down, lost-in-translation version foisted off on anyone who doesn't speak Russian. The original Tolstoy, in all his glory."

She knows he can see her wavering, because his smile broadens, and when there's no hint of threat in it, just the slightly overgrown bangs falling a little into his eyes, and the two front teeth overlapping just a bit, and the long soft lashes she could just kill to have, it's actually seriously sort of adorable.

She could tuck him in on the couch and brush the bangs from his eyes and bring him warm milk the way Daddy sometimes did, in those days Before, and if anyone ventures so much as a kind of mean look in just the vaguest direction toward him, well, you heard what she said about all the king's testicle donors and all the king's surgeons.

"Deal," she says.

"Excellent."

"I assume you'll be in touch? I mean, I like to think I have some experience with stalkers, and they usually just pop up whenever I least want them."

"Then that's when you'll see me," he tells her, still smiling.

"Ok," she replies, and it's hard not to return it.

She is almost to the opening of the alleyway into which he dragged her when he calls after her. "Caroline."

She turns with one eyebrow lifted, and the smile is completely gone, and there's nothing he can think to do with his hands, because he's got them in his pockets and then out of them, his heartbeat just freaking deafening in her ears, the scent of his nerves nearly as overwhelming.

"Is Tim still alive? I…heard the witches hit some of Nik's people hard the other day."

She lets out just the softest of smiles. "He's alive. Why don't you go talk to him at least? I think he'd probably like that."

There is a visible easing in his shoulders. "I can't do that. I'm not exactly on Nik's side anymore. Can't get Tim caught up in that. He didn't want to be."

"Well, why don't you ask him? Maybe he's changed his mind."

He flashes right up into her personal space, and lifts her hand to his mouth, smile carefully back in place. "Until I can 'spill my musky pearls in your honor' once more, Caroline," he says, and then he is gone.

* * *

Five days later some unknown number rouses her from the stack of files she has immersed herself in for the past three hours, and setting down her wine and snatching up her phone, eyes still to the page in her hand, she barks distractedly into the speaker.

"Hello?"

"Nod once if you're alone."

"I won't even bother asking how you got my number; like I said, I'm pretty well versed in stalkers. And if you can see me, why do you need to ask me if I'm alone?"

"You're right; I'm not actually peeping at the moment. So it's entirely fair for me to guess what you're wearing right now."

"Ok, just because Klaus isn't here, it doesn't mean you can hit on me."

"You're right, darling. That would be immoral. So, what are you wearing?"

"I thought you were going to guess."

"It's probably better for your delicate sensibilities if you just tell me."

"Rebekah spent most of today bringing you into every conversation in the bitchiest way she could possibly manage, which means she misses you; Klaus got really pissed at us both because we pointed out that his fly was open while he was quoting Ovid in his speech to his latest line-up of minions- it wasn't, we just wanted to ruin his mojo; and Elijah took off his suit jacket, his tie,  _and_ his shoes just to murder one guy who got uppity and tried to hit Rebekah."

"Yeah, he doesn't like splash-back. Apparently it's just awful to try and dry clean it out. I wouldn't know."

"Oh, and your boyfriend is nuts, by the way. Did you know that?"

"It's most of the reason I slept with him. That, and he has no gag reflex."

She rolls her eyes and sets aside the paper in her hand. "Gross."

"Was it him behind the fire at the Bourbon Orleans?"

"Well, not entirely, but he was the only one who made it out alive."

"He's actually quite wily. I like to think he picked that up from me. Like one of those sexually transmitted diseases, only without weeping members."

" _Gross_!" she snaps again, flopping back in her chair with one hand in her curls.

"And speaking of weeping members, your payment: 'For there was no maiden so fair, she made me weep from my pair; yet to your face, I set my pace, until I burst with a moan like a bear'."

She is still laughing five minutes after he has hung up and Klaus has let himself in smelling of blood and snow, Tim beside him stomping the winter from his boots, both of them giving her a look that squeezes the tears that much harder from her eyes.

"What's so funny, love?"

She sniffles and takes up the file open across the arm of her chair. "Nothing. I was just thinking about…bears. And…their pairs."

Klaus tilts his head.

"Sweetheart, how much have you had to drink?"

* * *

On one particularly shitty Monday he and two of Klaus' newest boys raid one of the lorries, the street a fuckin' rink beneath his feet, the gray sky with her baleful fucking eye of a storm cloud waiting to pass judgment on them all.

"Don't use your gun, you fookin' gom!" he hisses at the blonde one might have been called Troy or Trev or Constantinople. Something like that. "You'll bring the rest of them right down on top of us!"

"The hell's a 'gom'?" the blonde asks the other, and with a pinch of his bridge, Lord deliver him from the eejits and the fuckers, he rips open the door of the lorry, yanks the soldier from his seat, opens his head against the window, throws him down onto the sleet, and now on the other side of the truck the boys do the same to the driver, except of course with the guns he just told the little  _shites_ not to use, the rounds echoing in the street.

The back opens.

He takes a bullet from the rifle edges its nose through the doors, shoulder spouting with the hit, and now round the front of the lorry he goes, onto the bonnet, the roof, slithering on his belly over this thin sheet of iced-over metal, burning the fucking bejaysus out of his bloody gut where his shirt has ridden up, a whole fecking storm opening its throat with a roar underneath him, and the boys who knows where, dead if God never abandoned him after all.

He shoots his hand down over the roof, snatches the helmet of the next soldier down and out of the back, pulls until the neck tendons give way and the head comes loose in his hand.

He draws his revolver.

He shoots the one aiming at him from the street through the head.

Three more of them scrambling round inside, each with their own little giveaways, the rabbits of their hearts and that thunderstorm  _whish whish whish_ of the breathing and one of them with shit in his pants, reeking of the sewer.

He slithers himself over the one with the shitty trousers, and punches his hand down through the roof.

The serrated edges of the hole he has opened take care of the lad's scream and his head.

The others make a break for it, and round the sides of the lorry come the boys, blonde Troy or Trev or Fergus with his fangs already out and into the throat of the first of them, so down onto the second he drops, the man's gun scattering rounds into the air, his bladder leaking terror out the ends of his trousers.

"Take their guns, their ammunition, and any grenades you find."

They blink the bloodlust from their eyes.

"Can you handle that, then?" he snaps.

* * *

"'In your orbs, I search for morbs; for there is so little, it must be a riddle; but if my torpid snake, shall never again take, the salty tears of your dew, then I shall take the cue; and nevermore, will we couple with a roar'."

"Ok, seriously 'morbs' is not a word!"

"Nik has this thing about rhyming."

"Also, who the  _hell_ is he having sex with, that there's all this roaring and bear moaning and whatever? Oh my God, please don't tell me bestiality was, like, a thing back then."

"No worries, darling. Just some poorly-chosen descriptions."

"Ok, so, which do you think was the worst one he ever wrote?"

"No, no, no, darling- I'm not just giving that away. That's classified. If you want it, you have to tell me which knickers Tim's wearing today."

"I'm not looking at his  _underwear!_ "

"Just a peek."

" _No_."

"Do you think he's wearing any?"

"How in the  _hell_ should I know?"

"Just ask him. 'Timothy, would you say you're free, you're free ballin'!"

"You did not just  _pervert_ Tom Petty!"

"Go on and ask him, darling. Just like that. But record his reaction on your phone, and then send it to me. I'm going to auction it off at this charity that provides blankets to the poor."

"Right. I think it's called 'youtube'."

"I see you're a real philanthropist, just like me. I think we have a lot in common, actually. For instance, do you remember that one time I was sucking a priest's cock while Nik was-"

" _Stop trying to tell me that story_!"

"My silence in exchange for a picture of Tim's ass."

"Shh, shut up! Today Klaus and Elijah debated some old Greek philosopher for like three hours and I think the end result was that they each think the other one is stupid and wrong, and Rebekah and I ate this total creepo  _jerk face_ who tried to roofie her and I hear Klaus coming so okay bye!"

* * *

"I really need to talk with Mr. Jacobs," he tells the poor fucker's wife with all the earnestness of this face Ma used to tell him got put on by the angels.

She lets him straight in, course the husband would be happy to see him, just remember their daughter is sleeping, up all last night with a fever, little Meg and her teddy bear, so he makes an orphan of this little Meg with the teddy bear quietly, and he steps back out into the world red to the elbow, wondering does he at least get a nod for the girl still intact in her bed.

* * *

She parts the curtains on the first cubicle of the dressing room and up go her whole freaking  _armful_ of clothes, her throat just barely stalling on her scream.

"Hello," Kol says.

"This is the girl's dressing room!" she hisses. "Where I am about to be  _naked_!"

"I'm perfectly all right with that."

"Get  _out_! Besides, I thought this was supposed to be a  _clandestine_ thing!"

"It is. I checked to make sure no one was watching. Bekah's not with you today. Neither is Stefan. Nik won't come, because he's tired of picking wrong every time you ask him which material best suits your ass." He taps the end of her nose. "It's that sort of stretchy denim, by the way."

"Get  _out_ , you creep!"

"Once I pantsed Nik in front of the Queen of England. Bekah reports that he just stood there for a moment with his dignity and his trousers both in a puddle; I don't know. I ran very fast. Your turn, darling."

"Get  _out_."

"I believe what you meant was, 'Nik can hardly function without you; Bekah is so despondent she only changes her toe nail polish twice a day now; and Elijah has become so scatterbrained in his grief that yesterday he actually left the house with a smudge on his cuff link. Also, Tim will never meet another man as virile and has been ruined for the sweatier sex for life'."

She yanks him into the hall by the collar of his shirt.

"I like a little manhandling, darling. Now tell me how bad I've been."

" _Leave_ ," she snaps, and jerks the curtains closed.

His hand slips in under the curtain. "Did you want the lacey white ones first, or the black ones? I think the white might wash you out a bit with your coloring, darling, although black might be just a little dark. Also, are they really charging you thirty dollars for this?" He snaps the band of the thong he is holding. "You should probably eat them for that."

* * *

He doesn't think it's a thing to be alone for, the killing.

Supposes he isn't, for the whole of it, with his arms round the man like he might cradle a lover and the struggle of it grinding the man's ass back into his cock so that he's the blood up in more than just his cheeks with their fat black veins.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, maybe he draws it out.

Nips almost like he might have played round with the neck of his friend, curls his hands round the hard points of the hips, throws in a bit more lip than teeth, and the man just squirming, squirming away against him, till all the wriggle's gone out of him.

So he's a fair bit worked up, by the time he makes his unsteady way back to his hotel.

Used to be they'd kiss in between drinks, and he'd feel his way down Kol's trousers while his friend tilted his head back to just savor the taste of his last bite, the both of them breathing raggedly into one another's mouths, Kol nipping playfully at his chin, and the fucking  _smile_ of him.

Just push it on out the door without yourself, fucker.

And he was offering.

He was  _offering_.

You can guess how many heads he's even lifted, slogging his way as he does through awkwardness and years, and men understanding least of all the creatures with the tongues same as their own that it's chosen for them to save rather than wag.

But that man, be all right.

Charming little shit, he thinks, and cries alone in his shower with the tap cranked to fuckin' Antarctica.

* * *

"So why aren't you seeing Nik much lately?" Kol asks her one night as she is lounging in her hotel room, Stefan out on a blood bag run, phone to her ear, nail brush to her big toe.

"Why are you pestering me for obscene pictures of some guy I don't even like, let alone want to spy on in the shower instead of just, I don't know, stopping by his hotel like, "Hey, guess what, still in town, play a round of Seven Minutes In Heaven'?"

"It wouldn't be just seven minutes, darling. Also, you don't have to like someone to want to see them naked. I'm sure you had Nik pretty well mapped out in your head long before you were friends."

"Well, I don't want to see  _Tim_ naked."

"You didn't answer my question."

She dips the brush, slicks a tentative stripe down the right edge of her nail. "You didn't answer mine."

"I went first."

"Klaus is all caught up in being broody and murdery and he's hardly ever around the house anymore, and when he is, he's kind of creepily quiet, and I don't know how to bring him out of it. I know you think he doesn't care, and I don't blame you for thinking that, but he does. A lot. He just has this extremely weird, asshat way of showing it, but I feel like…I feel like maybe he's finally coming to terms with something. With how he has to act just a little bit less jerky, if he wants anyone to ever stay with him. So, if that's what's happening, and he needs to work it out himself, then I will just give him some space, and just concentrate on bringing Stefan out of his Elena funk." She switches the phone to her other ear. "Why am I always surrounded by moody men?"

"Maybe you ought to keep better company."

"Present company excluded, I'm guessing." She smirks into the phone, and tucks her tongue into the corner of her mouth as she edges another cautious stripe along the center of her nail. "Your turn."

"I already told you, Tim doesn't need to be caught up in any of this."

"Well, he's a big boy, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is, actually. Very big. And not one of those annoying ones with nothing but length, and the girth of a bloody pencil-"

"Ok, no penis talk. I'm putting a prohibition on penis talk."

"We can talk about Nik's, too. It's not like I don't know what it looks like. Cold, sweaty, mid-coitus- there just aren't any surprises left anymore, darling."

"And again with that complete and utter obliteration of boundaries- is that what happens after a thousand years? Ten centuries from now, am I going to walk in on Rebekah while she's, like, mid-orgy, and just stand there recounting what Angelina Jolie's trillion greats granddaughter wore to the twelve millionth oscars?"

"Or you might be participating in the orgy with her. Sexual identity gets a bit fuzzy after a few centuries."

She dips the brush once more, moves on to her next toe. "So, you weren't gay, a thousand years ago?"

"I'm not gay now. I'm all-inclusive."

She moves her tongue a little higher, babying the brush around the cuticle, careful, careful,  _careful_ \- aaaand…danger zone cleared. "Is Tim gay?"

"Tim's had both. He's just more inclined toward men."

"So, do you, like, go through a phase? Like, for forty years, you're really gay, and then for the next forty, it's all hetero, all the time? Or is it just, like, whatever you pull out of the hat?"

"Sometimes you're in the mood for one over the other. Sometimes you have both at the same time."

"So…did you and Tim ever do that?"

She can hear him fighting the smile out of his voice. "I thought you didn't want to talk about my sex life, darling?"

"I don't want to talk about your sex life with  _Klaus_. So whatever, whoever the two of you did at the same time, whether you crossed swords or not, I don't want to know."

"We didn't have sex with anyone else while we were together."

"So…do you love him?"

He pauses for just a moment. "Next question."

"Ok…do you have strong feelings of devotion and tingly stuff going on in the special region aimed in his general direction?"

"Why don't we talk about your 'special region' now, darling?"

"Bye!" she sings out, and hits 'end call'.

* * *

A murder and a meal and back to the church with him, Dickens in tow, banged up round the edges, the old man, been through a lot, he has, though none so much as the antique toting him round through the wars and the years.

He wonders sometimes, is it just him feels the years in his bones?

They press away at his eyelids, too, off to the Big Sleep with you, Timothy, had your stretch, outlived the best, and isn't as though in the next hundred, two hundred, thousand years man will have changed, and stopped making war on himself or put to bed his old hates rather than handing them off to the next generation, seen everything this great human mess has to offer, and most of it barely lifting its shoe to glance at you anyway.

Ah, no, he won't be sticking this revolver in his mouth and blowing the lid clean off him.

Tried that too.

He woke up with his gun and his blood in his lap and thereabouts in his skull a faint mention of the pain, and then he just went out into the sun had its nose poking out from behind a cloud for once and sat for a while with the old retriever didn't like him much till he started leaving out the bowls with the leftover scraps of his own meals, the conniving fecker.

What else to do, when you have died and woken up anyway?

He strokes the edge of  _Bleak House_ with his thumb.

So we tell the stories to keep us alive, we tell the stories to brand our words and all the messy insides of us into the compliant brains of all the readers all the world over, but what for a man who will have nothing but this timeless cycle of paper friends and naught else?

But, ah, then.

Gets in a right fuckin' mood, sometimes, he does.

Dust himself off sooner or later.

Think of something his grand old fucker of a friend would have said.

Fuck it, Timothy.

Literally, darling.

Solution to all life's ails and ills, according to the horny little shit.

* * *

"'And in the light of morn, I feel myself torn; your engorged petals so close, where I miss them most. For they are not yet but far, but somehow they are'."

"Do you think there's a way for me to subtly sneak these into conversations, so that he doesn't  _know_ I know, but there's that little hint of oh-my-God-what-if-she's-so-smart-and-powerful-and-pretty-she's-literally-absorbing-them-from-my-mind paranoia? I like to watch him sweat a little."

"I'm sure you do."

"You don't have to turn everything into a sexual innuendo."

"Pretty sure I do."

"I have to go. I'll call you later tonight."

"I'll hold my breath till I hear the sound of your voice again."

"You do that. Someone'll appreciate it."

"Yes he will."

"Gross."

* * *

"You!" Caroline barks at him one afternoon when he swings by to see if Klaus has anything for him, and he freezes against the wall, wondering can he make a bolt for the door before she's got him by the boys- by fecking God, she looks pissed-

"Hold this!" she demands, and heaps into his arms a stack of some frill and flutter that slithers round his biceps, paper tassels swinging with the momentum of her throw. "And if Rebekah asks, you moved them."

"What?"

"It's Elijah's birthday, and she wanted to do something for it, only she's doing it all wrong, so I'm fixing it for her." She takes the pencil she's got tucked behind her ear and marks off something on the clipboard she's carrying. "They were in your way or whatever. It's fine; you're not here that often anyway. Just stay away for a few days until she's cooled down. But she already got pissed at me this morning for something that was not even my fault, and I just don't want to listen to anything else, so you moved them, I didn't see anything, they're better off where they are now anyway, ok?"

She makes another mark on her board.

"Uh, actually, I was-"

"Shhjt! I'm thinking!" she snaps, holding up a hand. "How tall are you?"

"6'3"," he blurts out, shifting the whole mess in his arms.

"Great. If you stand on Elijah's chair, the leather one right over there? You'll be just tall enough to reach the corner where she should have hung them in the first place."

"I think Klaus probably has something for me to do-"

"Did I  _stutter_?"

No, ma'am, he didn't hear anything of the like.

Should he-

Is it a salute or a click of the heels or a tip of the hat she's expecting of him?

" _Move_!"

Well, that settles that then, he supposes, and gets the chair underneath him and the first of the streamers properly looped in a single breath.

* * *

"I know it's going to be a lie…but can you tell me that Bonnie was happy?" she whispers into her phone one night, and she curls herself more tightly into the sheets where Klaus' scent lingers but he does not.

Kol pauses for a very long time.

He clears his throat. "Of course she was, darling. She had me, didn't she?"

* * *

Nice night.

He forgets about those sometimes.

Just the moon on your shoulders, and the touch of dampness like that eternal wet smog of Ireland.

He flashes round behind the fucker's been following him for a good two blocks, sinks his teeth into the fattest vein, shoots the friend that comes at him from the side.

He pulls back, wiping his mouth.

His bullet found the kid's eye, and has left him incomprehensible but still with the one good eye blinking, blinking, so he squats while he waits for it to finish, taking out his packet of fags and tapping one into his hand.

Death hasn't anywhere to go, lad.

Got to just bend over and take him, you know?

Ah, but the poor fucker.

Just rolling his one good eye round and round, breathing like something beached, lying in his own mess of indignity, maybe thinking with his poor scrambled brain of his wife or the little baby asleep in his warm contentment of unknowing.

Well, go on and figure him for a softy.

He presses the muzzle of his revolver between the kid's eyes, and fires the finishing round, fag dangling unlit from the corner of his mouth.

He licks the thin trickle of blood that seeps out of the wound, and squints up into the sky.

Yeah.

The moon's a real beauty tonight, she is.

Coming up slowly in all her gentle glory, with the bright and merciful face of Heaven shining gratefully upon her, as Mr. Dickens would say.

* * *

"At the alley down just past the Monteleone, where fate first intertwined our star-crossed paths."

"Ok, well, one, it wasn't the first place. Two, stop talking like we're playing the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt to Klaus' Jennifer Aniston. I have Klaus, and you are doing the exact opposite of 'no homo' with Tim."

"Come on, darling. Come and meet me. Is Nik going to be home tonight?"

She gives one last quick peek to all the carefully-arranged tabs of the folders and closes the drawer of the filing cabinet with her hip. "Probably not."

"Then come out into the world and play. A small town girl like you- I bet you've never been to a drag show, let alone a vampire drag show?"

"No, and what's the difference?"

"Come and see."

"Ok, is there going to be some massive blood orgy or something, because I don't need to go back to my hotel stinking of sex and blood. Stefan is sort of on and off the bandwagon as it is, and I don't think that's going to be helpful."

"Well, I'd take you to one of Emma Johnson's sex circuses, but those went out ages ago, unfortunately."

" _What_?"

"One of the madams of a brothel that was part of New Orleans' red light district used to run these 'sex circuses', back in the day. All the sexual acts you could want, hetero or homo, men dressed like ponies, sex toys you've never even seen before, trapeze acts to put the Cirque du Soleil to shame. Lots of nudity. Also, once I saw the smallest cock I've ever seen there, which was sort of interesting, in a P.T. Barnum kind of way."

She coughs back her laugh, and with the phone cradled between shoulder and cheek, she makes her way over to Klaus' desk, shifting one hip back against it and leaning her weight into the edge, careful to keep herself free of the papers she has fastidiously tidied in the center. "Ok, fine; I'll come meet you. But no sex circuses!"

"What about the drag show?"

"Maybe."

"I can't let you go till you say yes to something scandalous. The blonde hair and big baby blues just scream for me to corrupt them."

"I am not exactly Mary Poppins, you know. Sometimes I eat people, Kol."

"But not nearly often enough, my little Honey Sprinkles."

"Where the  _hell_ did you get that?"

"From a 'My Little Pony' random name generator on the internet. I get bored," he says, and she hears the smile in his voice as she bursts out with this laugh she can no longer smother.

"All right; I'll see you in twenty minutes," she says, and hangs up.

She turns.

In the doorway is Tim with his hands in his pockets, and a startled shriek and three minor heart attacks and she presses one hand to her forehead, because where exactly in the holy freaking  _hell_ did he come from, and on what sort of little creepy Casper tiptoes does he tread, because she didn't hear even one single freaking  _peep_ from those trillion-old stairs, sighing their burdens into nights she would very much appreciate sleeping through, if it's not too much trouble.

"Oh my  _God_ , you're like a freaking  _cat_! You scared me."

"Can you tell me where he is? Please?" he asks, his throat working around these ragged, ragged questions.

"I actually am not sure exactly what you're talking about, but I have somewhere to be, so…if you don't mind." She makes a shooing motion at him.

"I just heard you fucking talkin' to him!" he snaps, and then he looks down with his thumb and forefinger to the bridge of his nose, letting his throat clear take the edge from this outburst she never would have expected from him. "I'm sorry. I, uh…I heard you…fudging talking to him? Fuck me. I don't know what to say."

He lifts his head.

"Just…would you tell me where he is?"

She pockets her phone with a sigh. "Look, he's made it sort of clear that he's not really interested in seeing you," she tells him, and every single part of him just crumples, his face so utterly wrecked that for just a moment she feels this tiny pang somewhere down deep in herself, where slumbers the Caroline who knows no vicious little manslut sniffing around her relationship, who sees only this tiny freaking kicked puppy of a thing in front of her, shoulders slumped.

"Is he mad at me, then?"

She sighs. "No. He's protecting you. He's…well, I don't exactly know the whole deal, but he's not exactly playing for our team at the moment. He's afraid Klaus will hurt you if he finds out Kol's still in town, and that he's probably working with…whoever it is he's working with. The witches, I'm guessing."

"Well, that's not for him to decide, is it?" He swallows thickly. "I can choose for myself, what's worth risking."

She leaves her hand in her pocket, drumming away at her phone with her nails.

"Please. I just want to see him."

He gives her the full force of this kicked puppy look of his, and, just,  _God_ , would you stop looking at her like she hates all things love, and sunshine, and joy- in second grade she harassed twenty seconds of embarrassed kissing out of Macie Greenwood and Devon Archer because they were seriously just the  _cutest_ , and their outfits didn't even clash, and last she checked they were still together, they'll probably be married, and go on to birth the generations she will never spawn, and so if you think she is immune to yearning, if you think she has never been pierced by just a name, and left crying in the dark-

Look.

It's not her  _call_ to make.

So she sends you away to the arms of a man who tries so hard not to let his loneliness through into his jokes, and you live, and you love, just for a while.

And then her boyfriend with the tender smile and the way he brushes her hair so gently from her cheek, he takes his hand, and he punches it through to your heart, and maybe she could have stopped it.

Maybe she could have  _stopped_ it.

"Please," he says in his soft little accent, and she shuts her eyes.

* * *

He juggles the phones of dead men while he waits.

There are naked pictures on the first (small cock, though, rather unfortunate-looking over all, really), quite a steamy text exchange between the owner of the phone and who he gathers to be the girlfriend's brother on the second, and the third disappointingly basic, which, fair enough, the man well made up for with his enthusiasm for 'alternative love' (the assortment of household items he craved in various orifices- quite fascinating, actually), but evidence is to be discarded, and so he tosses them small penis, gay affair, spatula asshole, into the skip, and claps his empty hands briskly together.

He'll pick up another somewhere down the lonely streets of this city empty of the innocent, here as the clock ticks her way round to one a.m.

Not that Nik's tracking her incoming calls (probably; perhaps; maybe), but no need to tie himself down to any one single number.

He checks his watch.

Late by five minutes, Caroline; going to get a mark for that one.

The priest story for sure, darling.

And here now are her footsteps (it's not so bad, darling; that priest gave as good as he got, with the repression built in him like a sickness) chipping away at the ice on the sidewalks, the breath high and strained in her throat-

No, too heavy.

Some man wearing his nerves like a cologne.

He leans against the wall at his back to delve his pockets for anything else that might be of interest while he waits, feeling all about the pea coat he stole from Nik to replace the one gone stiff and discolored with Tim's blood, giving his pecs a nice grope.

It's no wonder he hasn't got a 'no thanks' in his life.

The footsteps stop outside the alley, someone looking for a rob or a roll, he assumes, and he glances up with his most wicked smile.

It dies on his face.

Got what little beard he can conjure coming in, Tim does, and the stupid hat low on his eyebrows.

Not a jacket on him, of course, vest done up to the last button, pocket watch noisy in his hand.

He is not often surprised.

900 years will do that to you.

But when Tim closes the distance in two supernaturally quick steps and a hand on either cheek brings their mouths frantically against one another, he loses three stunned seconds of response.

And then he clutches the back of Tim's shirt in his hands and squeezes his eyes tightly shut -can't let the belief leak out of them with something so ill-advised as opening them- and he pulls the boy into him till they have taken care of the space between them, kissing the breath from them both.

They part for just a second, their lips still grazing, and then Tim presses a frenzied kiss to each part of his face he can get at, the dimple of his chin, tip of the nose, forehead, temple, back down the cheekbone, to the jaw line and the lips once more.

He pulls Tim's hips into him.

Up to the back of Tim's neck go his hands, to get him some leverage in this kiss that is all teeth and tongue and ragged gulps of air, and if these breaths are nearly sobs from relief or grief or lust, he couldn't tell you.

Tim breaks from him to kiss the dimple in his chin again, and they lean their foreheads against one another for a moment, smiling round their gasps.

"Hello; I'm Kol. And who are you?" he asks breathlessly, sifting his fingers through the hair at the nape of Tim's neck.

Tim pulls him in by the collar for another lingering kiss. "Gone to Europe have you, ya' fucker?"

"I was going to." He pushes the Donegal farther up Tim's forehead and kisses the slight mark its band has left behind. "But you know how it is, trying to escape my family. Till death never do us part." He puts himself nose to nose with Tim. "Caroline tattled on me?"

"Walked in on her talking to you. Well, I snuck up the stairs and spied on her soon as I heard your voice."

He kisses the corner of Tim's mouth. "I don't blame you. It would take a much stronger man than any of us to resist that particular voice." He pulls Tim's head down to get at the bridge of his nose with his lips. "You haven't seen me, though, darling. Nik will throw a fit. Go cool off at one of the pubs, and I'll see you…I don't know when I'll see you." He shuts his eyes again and draws out the three pecks he presses to Tim's lips.

"What's wrong with now?"

"I'm not sneaking round underneath the parents' noses, Tim. I think we're both a bit old to play Romeo and Juliet."

Tim grabs him by the cheeks once more, and squishes them nose to nose, his eyes shut, that little crinkle he just hates to see between his brows. "I'll decide when and if I want protection, you eejit."

"You didn't want to cross Nik.  _I_ don't want to cross Nik. Not in a way that puts you in between us, anyway."

"I changed me mind. I'll tiptoe round the fuckin' city, if that's what I need to do."

He strokes his hands down Tim's cheeks. "Nik will find out, Tim. He always does."

"Well, I realized five minutes after you left I'd have rather just gone with you, and risked the fucker anyway. And I'm a grown fucking man, and I'll decide what I get to risk."

"Tim." He moves his face from the boy's hands, and lowers his cheek to press it against his collarbones, getting himself fistfuls of Tim's vest.

"You don't want to?" Tim asks roughly, but the hand that comes up to touch his hair is very gentle.

"I'm pressed right against you. I think it's pretty obvious what I want to do."

"Fuck that fucker, Kol."

"You already did that, darling."

"I mean it. Fuck him. Fuck Klaus and all his  _fucking_  goddamned rules and fuck him for dictatin' your whole bleeding fucking life and who you can or you fucking can't-"

He lifts his head, and presses his finger to Tim's lips. "Shh, shh, shh. You're going to work yourself up into a heart attack. And then what will I say to the homeless I feed every second Tuesday, when they happen past and find me standing over a dead man with my hand down my trousers because he got me all worked up, and it's taking him too long to come round?"

Tim's got the color quite up in his cheeks, chest heaving with his anger.

He kisses his neck, and leaves his lips there. "Where are you staying?"

"The Omni Royal."

He takes a deep breath, shuts his eyes for just a moment, drags his nose up the boy's neck until he finds his jaw, where he presses another kiss. "All right. I'll meet you there in twenty minutes. Make sure no one's following you. If you're not careful, I'll eat you myself."

* * *

He has his moment of terror, standing before the door with the vampire heart behind it, and the scent of Tim's soap, and the nervous click click clicking of that bloody pocket watch.

It's just-

Time or death or Nik-

They're interchangeable.

If not the one then the other, and always him left holding nothing.

But he knocks on the door.

He knocks on the door and he listens to the pocket watch stop clicking and the nervous stutter of the heart and then the footsteps, bare of their boots, cautious as they come, everything just as turbulent in Tim as his own fluttering anxiety.

Tim opens the door and steps back.

He nudges it shut behind him with his heel.

And then don't ask him why he does it, but he stands here for just a moment looking up the four inches to Tim's face, the bright blue eyes beneath their dark lashes and the tongue nervously out to wet his lips and the color still in his cheeks from wind or February or rage, who knows, and then he just leans forward, and he puts his cheek to Tim's chest and his arms round his waist.

And Tim-

He cups the back of his head in one hand and lets him just stay here as long as he likes.

He can't-

He can't tell you what that means to him.

It's just been quite a few weeks.

You know?

He swallows and readjusts his cheek just a little, slides his hands a bit farther up Tim's back, squeezes handfuls of his shirt.

He has often enough been a burden towed round through the centuries, and so he won't unload anything, darling, he's just felt so terribly fucking  _heavy_ , wondering is Nik really gone for good and has Bekah truly wiped him clean off her shoe as she always meant to do, and has Elijah- has Elijah-

He turns his face so it's his eyes pressed to Tim's chest.

"I know, you bastard. Shh. Shh," Tim tells him softly, and kisses the top of his head.

For a while he just listens to the beating of Tim's heart and the roughness of his own breath, and somewhere in the hotel a clock ticking, and beyond the window all the night owls up and flitting about, laughing with the lightness of their insignificant years.

He kisses the hollow of Tim's throat, just once, and then he leaves his lips parted against it, breathing into his skin as the boy strokes the back of his head.

Tim kisses his forehead.

He moves his mouth to the crook of his neck, kisses this almost tentatively, tastes it again, slowly lets go that fistful of shirt to grip Tim by the hips.

Tim kisses from his temple down to the line of his jaw, round to his dimple, the corner of his mouth, works his way back up to that temple again as his hands fumble up to find the first button of his coat.

They both pull back just a little.

He kisses Tim gently.

Tim gets the first button undone, and another kiss, a bit longer this time, and there goes the second button, the third.

He pulls Tim's shirt from his trousers and sneaks his fingertips under the hem, smoothing with his thumb that line of hair that vanishes down under his waistband.

Tim undoes his last three buttons and opens the coat.

Their tongues are in on the act now, everything still languid, his hands untangling themselves from where they have crept just beneath Tim's waistband to set off a series of shivers down the boy's back, his fingers beginning to pick at the buttons on Tim's vest as Tim tries to push the coat from his shoulders.

He drops his arms long enough for Tim to slide it off.

It sails away somewhere into the corner.

Tim's hands thrust in under his shirt to find the ridges of his abs.

He snatches the cap from his head and flings it after the coat.

He seizes Tim by both cheeks and kisses a moan out of him, their teeth coming together now, Tim hard against him, both of them beginning to grind a little, Tim's hand stumbling down to get a handful of his ass as they open their mouths.

He rips Tim' vest the rest of the way open, hooks his ankle round Tim's, trips him down onto the bed.

They grapple with Tim's shirt for a moment until with an expletive he pants into the side of Tim's neck he just rips the whole bloody thing down the middle, and helps him wriggle out of the scraps, his own shirt mussing his hair as Tim gives it a tug round the collar that sharply parts the stitching and yanks it over his head.

He settles down skin to skin against Tim, breathing shortly through his nose as Tim sneaks a hand down between them and strokes his cock through his jeans, bucking himself into Tim's hand as he kisses Tim's neck and shoulder, putting out his tongue to taste both his nipples, Tim arching underneath him, both of them breathing in rattly little gasps.

Tim trails his lips tenderly down his neck and onto his shoulder, his fingers sliding round to his belt.

He unbuttons Tim's trousers, and lifts himself just slightly so that he can work his trousers and boxers down just low enough to free his cock, Tim's fingers busy with his belt and then with his button, his own cock bobbing free as Tim slides down his trousers.

He presses himself down so that they are cock to cock and begins to thrust slowly with his hips, Tim's head dropping back against the sheets, his hands coming up to grip his ass, to guide his thrusts as he chokes off the little noise in the back of his throat, his eyes fluttering.

"Tim," he breathes, and kisses the tip of his nose.

Tim moves his hands off his ass, up his back, wraps his arms round his neck, pulls him down so that they are forehead to forehead as they slowly work their cocks against one another, breathing roughly into the other's mouth, the friction tangling all the words in his throat, Tim angling his head just slightly down to kiss just beneath his bottom lip, one hand separating out from the tangle round his neck to rasp a tender little brush along his stubble.

He nips Tim's ear. "Roll me over," he says breathlessly, and in a blink Tim is suddenly no longer beneath him.

A hand on the small of his back pushes him down onto his stomach.

Tim untangles his trousers from his legs, and then he's draped along his back, his lips busy at his neck, his palms sliding over the backs of his own hands, their fingers tangling, the strangled breath he lets out muffled into the sheets as Tim presses his first slow shallow thrust into him.

"Jesus," Tim chokes out, and kisses the first knot of his spine, turning his face to put himself cheek first against the nape of his neck.

He claws up handfuls of sheet and pushes his hips back into Tim.

Tim slips both arms under his chest and kisses the nape of his neck, giving another languid thrust of his cock, and another muffled cry and a squeeze of his eyes and he unearths his mouth from the sheets to gasp, "Angle up just a bit", and a slight shifting of his hips and Tim does just that, hugging him more tightly.

He feels Tim kiss his neck again, and shuts his eyes.

Tim pumps away like this for a while, pulling nearly out and then easing himself back in one excruciating inch at a time, exploring the slopes of his back and shoulder muscles with lips and tongue, kissing his jaw line and his cheek and the tip of his nose when he works his way back up, pressing them cheek to cheek as he begins to pick up his pace just a bit.

He puts himself up onto his forearms for leverage, clenching his jaw as he shoves his hips back, Tim's fingers digging into his ribs as he gives a little gasp, and now a hand slips round underneath him and finds his slick cock, Tim's thumb caressing the head.

He struggles up onto his knees.

Tim wraps his hand round his cock and begins to stroke him roughly, pounding away now, their breathing jagged, Tim's cock hitting him just exactly right, and with an, "Oh fuck; oh  _shit_ " he spurts all over Tim's fingers, but up and down the shaft his fingers keep up their friction, and he drops his head and he chokes on each breath he tries to take, and then Tim gasps, "Fuck;  _fuck_ " and he feels the warm surge of Tim's orgasm as a second one pulls a garbled expletive from his throat and coats Tim's fingers in another slick layer.

He collapses onto his stomach with Tim boneless on top of him.

They lie like that for a few moments, fighting the air back into them, and then Tim takes a few more shaky recovery breaths and pulls out of him, pressing a kiss to the center of his spine.

He ought to do up his trousers and go, with Nik lurking always in the periphery.

But Tim slinks up next to him and puts the hair out of his eyes, and he's got very gentle hands, the smiling little idiot, with his happiness so bloody raw on his face, so he decides instead to keep this moment for himself, to evict the entire lot of his family and the old shades of them that love him, love him not, and perhaps he puts a bit too much of himself in this return smile, but once or twice or thrice, however many times you've lived, darling, no sense in wasting it.

* * *

She lets herself be picked up and jerked back into the nearest alley with a sigh.

This is so totally not going to become a thing, because a thousand years of freaky man biceps aside, she does not just have to  _take_ your manhandling, which,  _speaking of_ , should so totally about right now be getting applied toward certain other 'handling' if you know what she means, and if you think for a second-

She takes a deeper pull of this rain-scented air, one long drink of February frost, and she understands suddenly that these are not the arms of Kol Mikaelson with their faint whiff of Ambre Topkapi cologne, and into her assailant's foot sinks her heel and around his neck go her pretty pink-gloved fingers, and a heave of her arm and a thrust of her hips and over her shoulder he sails, his spine breaking on the pavement.

"Caroline,  _stop_! Caroline, it's me!" Tyler chokes out, and she freezes with her hand to his chest, fingers partway in.


	2. Part Two

"What are you still  _doing_ here, Tyler?"

She takes a breath of winter, and pulls her bloody hand from his chest.

"You cannot be here. Klaus will kill you if he finds out. Or did you forget that your, like,  _mortal enemy_ is the most powerful man in the world and is right now embroiled in a supernatural  _war_ that, oh yeah, just so happens to put him on the side opposite whatever pack you're hanging around with these days!"

"Caroline," he chokes out as his spine re-links itself.

"Don't you think this is probably the  _last_ place you should be? Don't you think that, maybe, you should be anywhere,  _anywhere_ but here?"

"What? You can't keep your boyfriend in line?" he snaps, and she lets the silence pile itself like snow between them.

"Don't talk to me like that."

"Why? Because you're his queen, or his empress, or whatever the hell it is he's made you? Or his  _bitch_?"

" _Bye_ ," she says, and spins on her heel.

"Caroline,  _wait_. Please," Tyler calls after her, and she stops.

She always stops.

She has always let herself be something over which all others' needs tread, kicking her as they go.

But she grew teeth.

She grew teeth and she shed her tutu and still she was little Caroline Forbes of the friends who chose someone else and the boys who left her behind, and she diluted so  _much_ of herself in this small town boy who picked as the world always will someone who is not her.

"Caroline, I don't know why you're with him. I'm not…I'm not going to even try and understand it, ok? We just need your help. That's how you make this up to your friends. To all the people we've lost. To everything he's  _done_ to us. You know everything. You know who works for him, what he's planning, where he's going to hit next- we need that information."

She looks up into the sky.

"Please, Caroline. Tell us whatever you can. I won't let him hurt you, I promise."

"I'm not doing that," she says tonelessly.

"Why? You're always the only one who's been able to get past Klaus, who can come out alive no matter what. We're trying to smooth relations with the witches; the only way we're going to take him down is to do it together. We need your help. Caroline- maybe there's some way we can get rid of him for good, without killing off his bloodline. It's worth  _trying_. It's worth looking for  _something_. He's done so much-"

"I know all that, Tyler"

"But you're not going to help us."

"Nope."

"Because you think his crush on you is going to last? Because he's paying  _attention_ to you-"

"Tyler, I will always love you," she says with her back still to him, and then a blink and a pivot and her right hook smears his nose across his face and he drops choking on the clots.

But he didn't mean it, she watches him say with his eyes.

It's just his  _mother_.

A whole sea of boys adrift without their natal tethers, just stumbling into the years.

Is this what Elizabeth Anne Forbes will leave behind when she goes, she wants to know, and she stands looking down at Tyler on his knees before her, his nose bloodying his hands to the wrist.

"Caroline, I'm sorry. I don't want anyone to get hurt," he says, all in pieces, like each of these words is a thing to be dredged up and spit out, and she turns away, and she keeps walking, because it's what she never did.

* * *

He can tell the fidgety little thing has less-than-stellar news, because the man pauses in the door of his office for nigh on a bloody year, just wringing his shaking hands.

"Well, mate?" he asks, sitting back in his chair and lifting both his hands.

He folds them behind his head and puts his feet up on his desk.

"Caroline was seen with one of the werewolves yesterday. They walked into some alley together. She left alone, but he wasn't far behind her, so she didn't kill him. We don't, uh, we don't…" The boy wets his lips.

Come on, then, mate.

He hasn't got all day.

He smiles humorlessly.

You know how he gets, put on tenterhooks in this way. Because he has before him years the stars themselves cannot comprehend does not excuse the frittering of his seconds.

"We don't know much about him. Don't have a name yet. He came in with one of the newest packs."

"Did anyone get a good look at him?"

"Yeah. But we didn't hear what they were saying."

"Well? Have you a description? Perhaps an anecdote? Anything that makes you more useful than this fumbling round?"

"Black hair. Big guy. I mean, not tall- but really built. Like a weightlifter. Or a jock. You know- maybe a football player. That type. Wearing a leather jacket and jeans."

Interesting how far down inside him reaches the pain of this smile he dredges up from the blackest parts of him.

"Put someone on her. Not yourself- she knows you. Pick up a human. A complete stranger; bring them back to me." There is a step outside on the sidewalk, a breath exhaled into the gray afternoon, the rustling of pockets in whose depths he smells watch metal and spearmint gum. "Actually- is that Tim I hear downstairs?" he asks as the front door whisks open.

Tim appears in his doorway a moment later. "It's me."

Had yourself a roll in the hay, then, mate, have you? Hair hastily reordered beneath the cap; that particular variety of sweat lingering beneath your soap; the microscopic rip of the first shirt button not plucked but torn.

Well, then, Timothy.

Good for you.

"Let's have Timothy do it, shall we?" He gestures expansively. "Timothy, mate- Jared here is about to be indisposed, so I'm going to need you to pick me up a human and bring them back here. Unharmed."

He snaps the left arm from his chair, and hurls it straight into the chest of this boy who just cannot duck quite fast enough, shame about that.

He was rather pretty.

Tim might have liked him, were he not off catting round some other bloke whose tastes run to the rather elitist in regards to his aftershave.

Amouage, is it?

He prefers something of the woodsy variety, himself.

"Clean him up. And get someone to fix my chair. Then go and pick up something obedient for me," he tells the boy, who stands very straight beside this corpse still finishing up its withered gray death.

"Right."

He tilts his head. "Anything new to report to me?"

"No."

"You're quiet. I mean, moreso than usual. Sure there's nothing you want to get off your chest, darling? 'Mate', I meant." He tips his head playfully from side to side. "You'll excuse a slip from time to time. You spend nine centuries together, you get all tangled up in one another."

Tim slips a hand into his pocket.

That watch of his fires off a nervous click.

"Speaking of getting tangled up in one another- how was he?"

The boy bangs the watch shut once more, opens it with a shaky click.

"Your friend, I mean?" He raises his eyebrows innocently. "The one whose aftershave you've got all mingled up with your own?"

"Do you own me sexual exploits now, too?"

He dimples. "Of course not, mate. I'll settle for your soul. Just making conversation."

Tim closes his pocket watch again. "The body, the chair, the human- anything else?"

"I think that's it. I'll give the leash a tweak if I need anything further." He smiles pleasantly and leans back in his chair once more, folding his hands beneath his chin.

Tim hoists the body up one-handed and vanishes.

* * *

He follows Tim for a good ten minutes, and there's something of his presence scratching away at the boy's instincts, because he starts to bury himself in the crowd, to put between them an entire wall of fragrant humans with their necks like perfume, his head bent but not obviously clandestine, his hands in his pockets, his stride just casual enough.

He's good at this.

Picked himself up quite the instincts in Ireland, dodging British and those observers of static cheek and brow, coating their stakes in that nonchalant suspicion of the overly-interested.

How do you do it, they always want to know.

Tell me your secret.

Is there a cream, some apothecary glue which sticks back together all the pieces Time so callously dismantles?

Absolutely, he told the girl who put her little stick in his chest and then backed away with a scream when he pulled it from his heart and he broke it over his knee.

Crème de l'Vierge.

Well.

He never limits himself to virgins -so few of those, whatever insisted those sly Victorian years with their frothy curtains round the filth- but it's just got quite the ring to it, you know?

History does love its sacrificial lambs with their hymens and their haloes.

He watches Tim step into one of the shops lining the street, and he slips between this building and the one snug on its left, trailing his hand down the wall.

He hears the stealthy heel-toe padding of someone slipping out the back, and he smiles and leans his shoulder against the wall and listens to Tim's breath go a bit impatient in his throat, his hand slipping on his gun.

Come on, darling.

Show him a bit of that Celtic initiative.

No?

Just going to stand round and shuffle your feet and wait for him to walk himself into your trap?

All right then.

He puts his hands in his pockets.

He always did look a bit less harmful that way. Mr. Joe College, out for his afternoon stroll, smiling round his midterm woes.

No sooner round the corner and Tim has an arm around his neck and both of them out of the public's view, and up go his empty hands over his head, his smile leaking through into his voice.

"I'm unarmed; just happy to see you."

" _Fuck_."

"Oh, come on. You knew it was me as soon as you grabbed me. You won't find this sort of ass on just any stalker," he says, and presses himself back into Tim.

"I thought you might be fuckin' Klaus."

"No; that's one sin I haven't tried yet."

"You know what I meant, you fucker."

"So you thought I was Nik, and you were just going to snatch him and…what? Shoot him in the head? Or is that not a gun in your pocket?"

Tim drops his arm.

He turns round to face him. "Meet me at the Hilton tonight? The one on St. Charles?"

Well, that's not the sort of enthusiasm he expected to see, after what you spent the whole of last night doing to him. "What's wrong?"

Tim shakes his head. "Nothing."

He's lying, of course.

He's only good at it if you don't know him.

"Really." He leans in closer. "Liars get a spanking."

That eases a bit of a smile out of him. "Well, I'll try and keep me truths to an absolute bare minimum, then."

"Strictly comments about my handsomeness."

"Obviously."

"So will I see you tonight?"

"Sure." Tim purses his lips and nods. "I'll slip away. But I've got to go. Your brother's put me on another one of his tasks. Pretty sure he'll let his girlfriend eat my balls if I don't get it taken care of in a timely fashion."

"You heard that rumor too?"

"Do you think it's true?"

He ducks his head and laughs. "Are you scared of her?" He looks up from beneath his eyebrows. "You're blushing. Caroline Forbes is the monster hiding in your closet."

"Ah, come on- fuck off."

He laughs again. "And so you drive your date out to some generic lover's point, you start putting the moves on them…then all of a sudden, a burst of static from the radio. And the emergency test sound, only this time it's not a test. The nearby asylum for the criminally insane has just lost a patient, the radio announces- the most fearsome and dangerous of all their inmates, a hideous murderer, slayer of innocent Irish boys. Everyone is cautioned to remain inside and keep their doors locked- but what's that now? Something scratching along the side of the car- you turn the radio down. Your date takes their hand out of your trousers. You think happy thoughts about handsome English boys. There's a burst of thunder. Another scrape down the side of the car. You're still thinking about handsome English boys. One in particular. He shall remain unnamed. Big cock. There's another scratch along the bonnet now; you see nothing through the window. You hear only the shrieking of the metal and the breathing of your date. And then- a strike of lightning. And illuminated in its flash stands… _Caroline Forbes_ , bloody hook held aloft and the penises of innocents between her rabid, animalistic teeth!"

"Go fuck yourself," Tim says, and he dodges the boy's playful shove, laughing.

He grabs Tim by the collar of his shirt and backs him against the wall, and he allows him one little breath before he kisses his knees shaky, pulling back just a bit when neither of them have got the air to continue and leaning his forehead against Tim's. "10:00?"

"Right, you fucker," Tim breathes. "I'll see you then."

He lets Tim slip out ahead of him, slapping his ass as he passes.

* * *

Such a peach, that Timothy.

One human, unmarred down to the nearly-pubescent skin on her china doll cheeks.

Shivering just a bit, poor thing. Probably thought this pretty young man was taking her for a nice bite to eat and then perhaps a little dessert, if you know what he means, because youth these days- so presumptuous, the whole lot of them, nothing bound up about them, sexuality plain as their noses, nothing of them buttoned away behind the staid cravats and bloomers of old.

Shh, shh, sweetheart.

There, there.

Nothing to worry about, love. All he requires is for you to document what is sure to be the downfall of everything he holds closest to his black and wasted heart.

He's sure you'll make it out just fine.

* * *

"And I slip my burning love rod into your shuddering man tube and there I slide in and out, in and out, until with a helpless roar you shriek my name to the heavens: 'Oh  _Kol,_ you British beast!' and, overcome by the sound of my own name, I groan, my tool with the thick fleshy lips spitting in droplets like lava the milky tears of my erotic dew," the fuckin' eejit whispers in his ear, and he laughs until the tears burn his cheeks, smothering the worst of it in his pillow.

"Where in the fuck did you get that?"

"What? You don't appreciate a little dirty talk?" Kol asks, draping a leg lazily over his own. "I'm offended. That was some of my best work. And it's not from anywhere; I just appropriated a bit of inspiration from  _Teleny_."

"Who's that? Somebody you fucked?"

"No, but I appreciate the jealousy in your voice, darling. It's a book. You've never heard of it?"

"No."

Kol tucks his face into the back of his neck, one of his arms flopping over him as well, and he reaches up and touches his fingertips for one tentative moment to Kol's own, feeling up the outline of his daylight ring like it's what he meant to do all along, and then he links them palm to palm and he works himself just slightly deeper into this messy embrace, lifting Kol's wrist for a sneak of a kiss.

" _Teleny_ , Timothy, is a popular 19th century children's novel about the heart-touching friendships that blossom in the unlikeliest of places."

"What the fuck kind of children's novels are you readin'?"

Kol plants him on his back with a jerk, and there the bastard goes with that smile of his, nearly putting his fecking heart through his sternum, the charming shithead. "No, I lied," he says. " _Teleny_ is an anonymously-written 19th century erotica sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde. It's also graphically gay. Imagine Elijah's shock, when he thought he was getting himself into another play or maybe a short story or a ballad."

He laughs.

Kol pins his wrists over his head.

"Actually, Elijah had a rather torrid affair with King James I back in the day. I know 'torrid' is to Elijah what 'ugly' is to me, but trust me. I walked in on some of it. Actually, I talked him through it."

"What, did he need your tips?"

"No, he was doing just fine on his own. I just thought he might like some kind of narration. And thus was the voiceover invented. 'Verily was it not my intention to slip my cock thus, between thine plush half moons, into thine core of mandom. But, alas, Fate stays not her hand for intentions, which pave in gold my path to Dante's gates.' Thus also was ham-fisted foreshadowing born."

He smiles up at Kol, opening his fists so Kol can slide his fingers up into his own. "And how did Elijah take your new inventions?"

"He finished and dressed and then gave me a lecture about conducting ourselves with class and the respect of privacy, and also the political faux pas that is addressing a king as 'His Majesty the Queen'. With his foot on my neck."

"Standing up for him like that- was your brother in love with him, then?"

"Oh, no; he wasn't talking about James. He was talking about himself. Anyway, he thought  _Teleny_ was 'pedestrian' and 'purple', but I don't think he was terribly scandalized by it. Nik and I used to like to do dramatic readings of it, and force him to watch whenever he got really dull. Once he walked into the house, and Nik and I had set up a stage in our living room, with props and everything, and Nik snags him and I leap up onto the bridge we cobbled together out of Elijah's favorite table and the legs from his favorite chair, and several of his books we'd painted up to look like bricks, and I stood on it and let loose with this whole monologue of inner demons about this love of mine I feel slipping away into another man's arms, and how shall I go on, and he's standing there with his arms pinned over his head by Nik, going all tight about the face like he does when he's really angry, and he starts correcting my grammar, and by that point we knew we were really in trouble, so Nik's still got hold of him, trying to figure out how to let him loose without getting ourselves put in his stocks, and I hop down from our bridge and tell him good luck, and I bolted for the door. Nik said a word I can't possibly repeat in front of the youth and let loose of Elijah to try and grab me as I sprinted past, which of course freed up Elijah to put him in a headlock, and I never did find out what Elijah did to him, because I ran for about two years before Nik tracked me down in Paris and drowned me in the Seine till I said I was sorry. I had my fingers crossed, though. We also used to just slaughter some of Shakespeare's works for his viewing pleasure, until he killed us. We'd wake up with blood to the ceiling," he says, and he laughs till there's pain in it, so he strains up far as he can and gently kisses the bastard's chin, and he rests his forehead there until Kol lets up on his wrists and cups the back of his head, and round the fucker's bare waist go his arms, so that at least he knows.

Don't have to lean on your family's love until it collapses underneath you.

"Want to go eat people?" Kol asks finally, pulling his head back by the hair at the nape of his neck and stroking the feathery strands there. He presses their noses together. "Want to help me take a shower first?"

They both smile.

"And once you come back with blood to your fuckin' elbows?"

"You can help me take another shower." Kol flicks his tongue.

* * *

Go all out, he always says.

So when Tim creeps back to report that Nik hasn't got any lackeys within four blocks of their play area, he strides out into the street, hands in his pockets, and he smiles amicably at this pimply blonde soldier's request for ID.

He tilts his head.

He slaps the boy's head across the street.

"Motherfucker Jesus  _Christ_!" his partner screams, voice high as a girl's, and Tim gets his hand into the poor thing's vocal cords, and wads them up into one pink mess he shakes off his fingers into the street half-frozen beneath them.

He kicks in the door of the Voodoo Authentica, where they have set themselves up a temporary home till the Bourbon Orleans can be replaced.

"Greetings, soldiers. Put down your weapons, please. I don't want any trouble."

Tim shoots six of them through the head before they can blink.

"I was just kidding. I'm a great kidder."

He takes a bullet to the cheek and cracks his neck.

Over the counter goes Tim as the store erupts, and into the center of it he strides, just considering his options, giving them all a contemplative squint of his eyes, one thumb feeling the stubble on his chin, head tipped thoughtfully to one side. "You know, I actually once considered a career in comedy," he tells a man he punches in the face until he's all mashed together, his features gone runny as his blood. "I don't know if you knew that." He ducks a swing from a soldier who's panicked all his ammo into the wall and now has only this little club of a thing, splashed to the sights with his friends' blood.

He breaks it over his knee, snaps the man next, tosses them both aside.

He slips the man's M9 from his holster and lobs it toward the counter. "Tim."

Up pops that cap, then down again it bobs.

"My brother, actually- he sort of invented stand-up comedy, so, I mean, it's practically the family business. He wasn't very good at it though."

"That's because all his fecking jokes start with 'Did you hear about?' Insert the shittiest follow-up you can think of and you've got yourself a Michelson 'act'."

"The man who got hit in the head with a can of soda? He's lucky it was a soft drink."

"The crime that happened in a parking garage? It was wrong on so many levels."

He slams two of the soldiers' heads together so hard their skulls split inside their helmets with a great crack.

Tim pops up over the counter once more, M9 in hand, and fires off a couple of shots into the smoke.

"Be careful. You almost grazed me."

"I wasn't anywhere fuckin' near you!"

"He's very proud of his shooting skills. Double entendre intended," he tells the soldier he lifts whimpering by the throat, and winks.

Tim shoots the man out of his hand.

He swivels round toward the counter. "That one was mine."

Tim grins.

He dips down to let the counter take the brunt of this fusillade let off by the final two, and then down goes that M9 with a clatter, and Tim flashes out into the thick of it unarmed, and the little shit's about to fall on the one he's picked out, so he hip checks him sideways into the wall, rips out the man's carotid, turns on the last with a smile.

Tim tackles him.

They hit the floor hard enough to crack his hip, but he's the use of all his other limbs, so he strikes out with his arm and sweeps the man's legs out from underneath him as Tim's wriggling round on top of him, trying to get hold of the man, and a brief struggle and he lets Tim wrap his fingers round the man's ankle, jerking him with a scream along the floor.

He throws Tim off him.

"So close, darling," he says, snapping his fingers.

He buries his face in the man's throat.

The soldier drops back against the floor with a rather hollow thud and he sits up with one arm draped over his knees, the other going up to wipe his mouth.

Tim points at him. "You're a little shit, Mikaelson."

"Don't be such a Nik about it, O'Sullivan."

Tim drops his head, his shoulders shaking. "I'll have to remember that one."

He leans forward to put both his elbows on his knees, and smiles up into the boy's eyes. "I'll even let you take credit for it."

"Oh, well, thank you. Don't ever let anyone tell you you're not just fuckin' grand."

"I tell myself that every day."

"In your mirror."

"With my hand down my trousers."

Tim cracks his neck and leans his head back against the wall, still smiling.

"How long do you think we have until the police show up?" he asks, dusting all the little debris of death from his trousers as he stands.

"Few minutes, probably."

"Do you want to wait for them?"

"Nah. Let's make a daring, last-minute getaway." Tim takes off his cap and runs a hand through his hair, ruffling it till it stands up just a touch, his sweaty forehead keeping just a few of the strands for itself.

He watches the muscles in Tim's forearms as he shakes the worst of the blood from his cap, and when the boy glances up to catch him at it, there's a little smile and the flush of the cheeks, really just bloody precious, isn't he, and then the rising of the sirens pulls their eyes from one another and dart them toward the window, and Tim presses his hat back down onto his head.

"So when is this daring escape of yours supposed to take place? Or do we wait till they're literally kicking down the door, darling?" he asks, and drags one thumb slowly over the dimple in his chin, to smudge away the last of his meal.

Tim flashes to the door, and peeps his head round the corner, one shoulder resting on the jam, his thumb hooking itself over the edge of his pocket, those forearm muscles standing out once more as he lounges like this, one leg kicked casually out in front of him, hips cocked just a little forward, head back against the jam.

Just a picture, darling.

"About two minutes, do you think?" Tim asks him.

He pulls the boy from doorway by the collar of his shirt. "About," he says, and presses Tim back into the wall with his hips, both hands on his cheeks.

You could say the sun comes out on his face, when he smiles.

He didn't see it much when Nik had his hands on him, but there'd be a slip of it every so often, the whole of him lit up, just bloody brilliant, and he'd stop, and he'd stare for a moment, and he'd go off himself, his lips hurting with the stress of it, because nothing for a smile like that but to be made light by it, to remember it's not only through shadows that you must toil, that so too exists the sunlight he sometimes forgets to see.

A whole lot of rot, he knows.

But there are such smiles.

You gather that up too, with your 900 years of filth.

Tim wraps both hands round his wrists and leans in to kiss him, and he squeezes his eyes shut, both of them sighing through their noses, Tim pulling back just slightly to catch his breath, eyes still shut, and then he shuts them tighter still and swoops in once more to kiss him dumb, all the jokes gone right out of him.

In the distance rise the sirens and up his thigh creeps the hand Tim peels from his wrist to feel up the line of his trousers, thumb sliding high enough to make him twitch, and when at last the tires shriek to a halt farther down the street he breaks away with a shuddery breath, smiling hazily. "Taking it right up to the wire, are you?"

The car doors screech open and into the street flood the officers, the poor things all strained about the throats, the breath gone tight and thin in them, the hands sliding about wetly on their guns, the hearts with their animal quickness pushing the thirst up near his lust, his fangs tickling his gums with their quick peep into his mouth-

Tim runs his tongue over one of them.

He shuts his eyes and lets himself shudder through this.

The boots reach the doorway.

"Put your hands where we can see them!" someone screams, but a warning like that's only a leftover bit of training, with the bodies piled round you in still-warm stacks.

He wraps his arms round Tim and whips them both to the side, putting his own back in the path of their first thunderous barrage, and as the little nuisances open him up from his shoulders to his waist, he tips himself up onto his toes to give the boy's chin a playful nip. "You're in luck, darling- not a single wooden bullet among them." He lands a kiss on Tim's ear. "Off you go, then."

* * *

He stares out the window when the human makes her reports.

Regular meetings of the clandestine variety, alleyway excursions, side street jaunts, all the shadowy little nooks which lend themselves to lovers.

But she hasn't the gall to sneak in close enough to overhear those heartfelt whispers of the suppressed, she confesses in her own whisper, and so with a smile he takes her chin in hand, and he strokes his thumb lightly down her lovely cheek, and he tells her do not be afraid, sweetheart, for it is not just man with his heart full of mercy.

He snaps her neck mid-way through her stammered thank you.

Or maybe it is.

* * *

Fee-fi-fo-fum.

He smells the blood of an Englishman.

"Please," stammers the poor new thing with his fangs hardly defiled, his chest laid open to the heart. "That's all I  _know_."

He likes that little dimple in your chin, mate.

And those blonde curls- such a sheen to them, put your fingers right through them all the way to the root, to feel the slip of that commercial luster, thumb tender along those few flyaway imperfections.

He rips them out.

The man screams.

He puts his heel so hard through that little dimple of the chin that the man's entire jaw shifts with a crunch.

"No no no no no no  _no_ \- Jesus  _Christ_ ," the man sobs.

Well, don't look at him like that, darling.

Mate.

He means mate.

Of course he does.

Anyway.

He quite concurs.

No no no no no no  _no_ indeed.

* * *

"Tim," he tells the boy one evening, as they are strolling along almost companionably he should say, Tim's hands in his pockets, his swinging freely, the street lights draping them both in that soft butter of the lamp. "Take that nice officer's gun from him, and shoot him in both kneecaps."

Tim stops.

"Right in front of the fuckin' barricade the soldiers have set up?" he hisses, and never say this one hasn't a bit of rebellion in him after all.

But they all bend.

Time, death, his family who will flee and flee again, who will never stop returning at the only incentive he can manage, that twiddling of the leash that brings them all, man, creature, friend, foe, scampering round to his side where he secures them as they all must be managed, with the chains of the damned.

So the boy steps into the street and he seizes from this officer of the law the weapon he uses to put a round in either leg before the horrified eyes of tourist and local alike, and he puts on a show, truly he does, he applauds the lad through it, letting off that strident whistle of the appreciative audience, but in the end though he collects the hearts of half a dozen soldiers, poor Tim lies twitching in the street, leaky as the clouds which have opened their pores above his head, breaths rattling in his chest.

"You'll be all right, mate," he says cheerfully, and steps over him. "Which of you isn't on vervain, hmm?" he asks of the survivors who empty their magazines into his chest, shrugging off this assault as he has shrugged off so many similar offensives, head tilted to one side, hands politely folded.

What a little thing steps forward.

He pats him on the head.

He fires this pistol the lad so kindly passes him into the heads of the boy's armored friends.

"What a shame- some man, right out of the middle of nowhere, ranting about constitutional rights and the militarization of the police- quite the nuisance are those buggers, am I right?" He ruffles the boy's hair mischievously. "You were taken by surprise. You were the only survivor. He was wounded multiple times- dragged himself off somewhere. Better put a search party out for him. Looks like the tide's beginning to turn with the citizens. You might want to have a care with them from now on. Never know where the enemy is lurking. Good lad," he says, and pats the head just even with his chin once more.

Tim rolls himself onto his back, spitting blood.

"Come on, Tim- where's your sense of adventure? Play along." He turns the boy gently round to face him as Tim struggles up onto his knees. "You've got a description of the perpetrator, mate. Go on; call it in."

He smiles.

Tim spits another glob of blood.

Well that's quite a look, now isn't it, mate.

Almost as if you wished him harm.

That pierces him.

Truly.

You wouldn't believe how soft he is, beneath this carapace of years.

He shoots Tim in the calf, and the boy buckles, splashes forward onto his hands and knees in this dripping pink street. "Better hurry, mate."

He smiles again.

He hands the soldier his pistol and the boy wings a shot off Tim's shoulder as he garbles a request for back-up into his radio, and with another gout of blood -that's a rather alarming amount of the stuff; better have an eye to that, Timothy- he pushes off his knees and he staggers shakily to his feet, and into a nearby parking garage he stumbles as the soldier squeezes off another round that skims white cinders along the pavement.

"Have a good one, Tim!" he calls out, lifting his hand in farewell.

* * *

He hurtles the cars and he bellies out underneath them as the soldiers run him down like a bleedin' rat, the blood in his mouth, his eyes, his fecking  _ears_ , just roaring away, the shakes all through his fuckin' legs and his shoulders, heart pressed like a fist against his sternum, pounding the whole goddamn length of his chest to the same jelly what's in his knees, and overhead flash the little stars of those lights never deterred a robber or a rapist in his life, and please, oh fucking  _please_ , God-

It's not for him that's abandoned you to appeal to your mercy, and he's  _lived_.

He understands he has.

But coughing up the foam of his life onto the tarmac underneath him, it doesn't feel like it, him still young in his skin though his soul's long gone to rot.

He's a selfish goddamn gom he is, clasping his hands for the few more years to which he is no longer entitled, him with the decades just fecking heaped on him.

But if you have left him for  _whatever_ fucking  _reason_ , his sins of flesh or soul, at least let him, Jesus Mary and Joseph  _let him_ not go alone to the fate he fears greatest of all.

He lies bleeding out beneath the chassis of some truck, listening to their boots miss him by a row, everything echoing in this cavern, the whispers and the steps and the click click clicking of the rifles reaching him a thousand, thousand times.

For so long he lies so, emptying himself everywhere.

And then he picks himself up as all man must, though it puts all the worst parts of his stomach through his nose and his mouth, and he staggers his way home to the dark figure waiting on his bed, and what in the hell happened Kol wants to know, of course he does, and oh, the poor fucker's heart.

He just can't cut it up like that.

So he just falls into his chair, smearing his weary night all up the back of it, and he takes off his boots with shaking hands and he fires off with some nonsense about a bit of bad luck, and no mention for a moment of that brother of his who one day will push him to the breaking point, and the outcome of that particular clash- well, has he to spell it out for you, then?

So he says his good-byes.

He says his good-byes in all the deepest parts of him, where he first buried this friend of his who kneels to help him with his buttons, and of course he wants to know will it hurt and is there a bright light come down from the heavens and have you a hand to lead you forth and will his ma cross this divine separation of man and monster to find him as he has lived most of his years, alone with his leaden tongue and the fetters of his shyness just dragging him down and down, her nose turned up for shame, because fuck him he doesn't want to go  _alone_.

So his life has been an island- is his death to be the same, marooned with his memories?

Is that all he's to have?

"What's wrong?" Kol asks him, and he shakes his head, and he covers for himself as his friend always does, with a smile.

It just fuckin' hurts, he says, and God you fuckin' strike him down where he sits if he's telling a lie, you fuckin'- you fuckin'  _strike him down_ , bastard, he  _dares_ you-

He didn't think so.

* * *

She hasn't seen him in over a week when he steps into his office so stealthily she barely even registers the pressure of his heels against the floor, and the way she looks up from the file in her hand- it's too hasty, he'll sniff out the guilt in it, there's a spark, a tremor, a nervous tweak of one of her curls that will give it away to this man who knows everything, who lets nothing pass unnoticed, who for a thousand years has put himself on the scent of his never-ending prey and ran them to their end.

But his look is just… _so full_.

So she sets down her file.

She sets down her file and she closes the space between them and she rests her cheek against his chest, and she doesn't embrace him, that's for him to do if he wants, but she fits herself to him and she breathes him in, rain and aftershave and the fresh whiff of his thin leather jacket, and there's a breath like he's drowning, and then he's clutching her so  _hard_ , and then so quickly she stumbles forward and nearly falls, he is gone.

* * *

Nik is not looking at her when he says, "You won't leave, will you?"

Her brother's story is not a tragedy, she thinks, for calamity lowered upon one's own head does not retain its pity when its target is both perpetrator and prey.

But it very nearly is.

He goes alone because his fear has made him such a small thing on the inside, this renaissance monster of a million philosophies absorbed from the pens of worldlier men.

But we choose our loneliness, Nik.

You never did understand that.

Such a boy, her brother.

So when the world has burnt itself to a crisp beneath the wars of these humans whose small lives detonate with such force they pit the planet for centuries, he will prop his boot on the husks of them all, because such is his fate, he tells himself, this is the skin into which he was stitched and in which he must remain bound, but he'll have clawed himself all the way to that summit of the dead, crested by no other.

She watches him smooth the edge of his drawing with his thumb.

He glances up just briefly.

She cocks her head and laces her hands on her knee.

She'd never tell you, Nik.

She'd never tell you, but all her very long life she has cut away a few fibers at a time this tether you have built of her loves and her loneliness and one day with light and joyful heart she will snap the final strand and away she will soar, as history has never allowed her kind to fly.

A woman for the traces, and man at his whip.

It makes no difference if you pat the poor beast's nose and give it a good crooning before you lash it off down through the years with your hand always round its survival, Nik.

But she says no.

Of course not.

Kol has fled, Elijah gotten himself all tangled up in that Petrova tart, and so whatever her thoughts on your handling of their dear undeparted brother, you bloody fumbling idiot, there's always need of a handler to loiter round and pinprick that ego back down to reasonably manageable proportions.

Caroline is an apt pupil, of course.

But she hasn't yet the left hook to smear your narcissistic twat smile across your face, Nik dear.

"Are you getting this lighting?" she snaps, tilting her head. "You know it's the one I look best in."

And he smiles, and he adds a line to his sketchpad, and he probably knows -she wouldn't dare to say it out loud, but he knows everything, really he does- one day these two blonde loves of his will be sketched from pale memories in a studio where he hunches alone, and somewhere out in the great wide world all the friends he didn't know how to keep and the family he never understood how to love cavort round smiling all the wider for his absence, and he'll live in his tower of ivory and iron with the throne surrounded by blank echoing halls and there lies all the power in the world whisper the myths of men, and the monster who can't be slain.

And oh, Nik.

If she could save you from yourself.

* * *

"Have we just lived too long, Elijah?" she asks one night as her brother drinks gracefully from his glass of O negative.

"Maybe happiness is finite."

Kol wouldn't say that.

Kol would be sure to find the joke in every last black corner of the earth.

But he left.

He left smiling after all those words she stuck into his heart, and she'll never forget that.

"Rebekah," he says, and when she lets slip that frail shell of bitch and she hastily wipes at her eyes before he can see, Elijah sets down his glass and he rises from his chair to hold her not as Nik does, like he knows what will happen when he lets go, but with a gentle hand on the back of her head, and her face clasped loosely to his neck.

"I just want him back, Elijah," she whispers, pressing her eyes against his shoulder. "Both of them."

* * *

"I hope your confession was a good one," he says, yanking the curtain of the confessional shut behind him.

He leans down to kiss Tim roughly. "You're going to need to be forgiven for a lot."

"Oh really?" Tim pants, pulling them both down onto the bench, their legs tangling in the cramped space.

They bump noses leaning in to kiss again, and he turns his head to the side to smother a laugh in Tim's shoulder.

Tim licks the side of his face, and pulls away laughing.

"Oh, right, well if that's the way you want to play it." He pins Tim down by the wrists and leaves a trail of spitty affection across his face, getting a good sloppy kiss in right on the lips with the boy slurring laughter and expletives through the assault, hips twisting underneath him.

He pulls back with a smile. "Do you remember the first time we were here?"

"In the church, or the confessional booth?"

"The booth."

"You compelled that woman to watch me suck your prick. And then we ate her."

"I thought it was very romantic."

"You've the soul of a poet, Mikaelson."

He ducks his head down to kiss Tim again.

He moves from his mouth to his chin, down his throat, sliding his hands up off Tim's wrists and wriggling his fingers up into Tim's till they are both white with the grip they've got on one another. "Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight!" He kisses Tim's neck, his jaw. "For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night." He nuzzles Tim's ear, and lightly bites it. "Talking about the first time I saw you naked, by the way. And not my heart."

"You're a fucker, Romeo." Tim strains up to kiss him, and for a moment they lose themselves in this, their fingers tightening, the breathless lust of this furtive meeting softening into something else, till he has to let up on Tim's hands to grab the back of his neck and pull him even closer, half-raising the boy up off the bench.

"You can't die, do you know that?" he asks when he has got the breath back to say it. "Please?"

Tim's whole face crumples. "Oh, you fucker."

"I wish I'd come and found you right away. When Elijah undaggered me. I should have just said piss on them all and set off," he confesses roughly, and he doesn't bother to patch this over with a smile, he's not even sure he can, with the terror in him just squeezing and squeezing, Tim holding both his cheeks now, and his thumbs the gentlest things he's ever felt, stroking from the corners of his mouth to the edge of his jaw. "I didn't even consider it," he says, swallowing his way through the words as Tim just lies here patiently listening. "When I show up-" He wets his mouth nervously; Tim touches his thumb tenderly to his bottom lip. "When I show up- it's to be an extra. And it'd been almost a century." There is a breath through his lips, laugh or sigh or cry, either way, it's no sound for a clown, but the thumbs go on, just stroking, and there's no squint of the eyes demanding their bloody joke, give this comedian a shake and set him right again, so he goes on as well, as he always does, but a bit lighter for it this time, with the rest of his confession resting not on deaf ears. "So I was scared."

Tim smiles softly up at him. "You could come find me in five hundred years, you fuckin' eejit."

He breaks out in a smile that hurts his cheeks, and that soft little thing on Tim's face just lights up into that grin once stopped him in his tracks and left him dumbfounded where he stood. "Even if you were fat."

"But how fat, darling?"

Tim lets go of his cheeks and holds his hands out to either side. "Three, four times your size. So I'd have to carry you round in a wheelbarrow, and we'd always have to buy out a whole row of seats, just to sit next to one another on the airplane."

"Well, now  _that_ sounds like true love, Timothy."

Tim loses that smile of his by gradual increments, and lies looking up at him, one arm slipping up behind his head, the other slithering over his chest, where it settles to nervously fiddle one of the buttons of his shirt. "Do you want me to say it?"

He swallows round the lump in his throat and ducks his head to aim his smile down at the hands he settles on Tim's hips as he sits up just slightly. "You can just go on looking at me like I'm the best thing you've ever seen. I think that would do it."

Tim snorts and lifts his hand from his button to drag it over his face, and when he's got down to his chin the snort has deepened itself into that great laugh straight from the belly, both of them shaking with it. "Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ," he breathes, lolling his head to one side and wiping the tears from his eyes as another round sets his shoulders to trembling.

He laughs helplessly along even if Tim's lost him a bit, and gives the boy a flick to the chin. "What?"

"Your face," Tim gasps, curling in just a bit on himself. "Your fuckin' self-inflated, shit-eating face. Have you ever suffered a moment of modesty in your whole fecking life?"

"I thought that was why you slept with me in the first place?"

"Right. I think you introduced yourself to me with a 'Hello; my name's Kol. I'm moderately skilled in the homosexual arts and my prick is of unexceptional size, but I have a decent idea of what to do with it, if you're feeling inclined toward trying another Mikaelson'. Went just like that, didn't it?"

He digs his fingers into Tim's hips and breathes exaggeratedly through his nose, kissing frantically from Tim's shoulder to his neck. "I just love it when you talk dirty to me. Say something else about pricks of unexceptional size."

Tim ducks his head to catch his lips as he makes his way across his chin, and tongues him roughly for a moment, till the exaggerated breath is a bit more genuine now, his cock stirring in his trousers. "I love pricks of unexceptional size," Tim breathes into his mouth, and twists his collar in his hand, till the air is nearly shut off entirely from him and the boy's face has taken on a pleasant black gauze. "I like to take them," he sucks his bottom lip and bites a few droplets of blood from it, "and put them in my luscious Irish mouth parts," he smothers a round of snickers with another thorough tonguing, "and just drag and drag on them until they spew their hot molten larva like a little wee snake vomiting death."

He has to shake Tim's hand loose from him now and lean back to get in a good belly laugh of his own, eyes smarting.

Tim points up at him. "You know what I did? The last couple of nights while you were out, I stocked up on those shitty bodice rippers, and I scanned 'em right fuckin' through, right? Five of them in two nights. I didn't want you getting the upper hand in shitty pillow talk, so I fecking devoured 'em, and let me tell you, Mikaelson, you're in for some right bleedin' treats." He nods and looks so tremendously pleased with himself that it sparks off another whole round of that sonorous laughter, the pitch of it scaling higher and higher up each wall, till the ceiling itself reverberates with this God-like rumbling of these hallowed four walls. "The 'hot larva' thing is an actual line. Came out of some woman's hot cave. Incidentally, I don't think I'll ever be straight again."

He leans forward to cage Tim's head with both of his arms, smiling down at him. "Why would you want to be?"

Their next kiss is a bit more serious, the spark of it catching on in a second between these accelerated hormones of the monster with his heightened sense of everything, and in a moment Tim's half-hard cock is nothing but fully committed to its cause, his own straining away at his zipper, so he reaches down for Tim's hands and he brings them up to slip them round his neck, and there's a moment of tentativeness in Tim's fingers as he tests the give of this vulnerable white curve, and then comes the rough squeeze and suddenly they are both off the bench and Tim has got him against the wall by the throat, pinning him there one-handed as he rips his belt open with the other, their lips busy at one another as he exhales his moans like death rattles while Tim's hand frees his cock.

Tim gives him a squeeze round the throat and he watches the ceiling of the confessional glaze over and the curtain grow itself a hemline of fuzz and then Tim begins to almost brutally jerk him off, till he is nearly on his knees with the pleasure of it, one hand clutching helplessly for Tim's shoulder, knotted with his exertions, both of them gasping, Tim's forehead sweaty against his own, his hips pistoning forward in rhythm with Tim's hand, his toes curling in his boots, the ceiling gaining another patch of black and the curtain with its nebulous hemline going spotty before his eyes, his rising orgasm gathering almost painfully-

"Tim- oh  _shit_ -" he wheezes, and Tim kisses him through it as his mouth opens with the shock of his release, following him down to his knees as the force of it makes water of his limbs, everything gone to pitch for one stark moment through which he reels dizzily, his ears ringing, his face buried in Tim's shoulder as Tim lets up on his throat at last and leans into him with one arm slung round his neck.

"Take your pants down," he says a little shakily when at last he can. "I'm going to fuck you against the wall until you pass out."

* * *

She leaves the window open when she works, to let in the smell of humans.

And in waft all these compilations of humanity, the sweet and sour of them, the fetid unsoaped homeless and the perfume like a weapon before girls who put their heels in warm gum and have no greater crisis than the scraping of it, and she's not gone, she still wants to be like them, bouncing along through her years checking for that first harbinger of age at the corner of each eye, but she listens to the warm life of them and to her own oddly fluttering unlife, and she just…

There's a pang.

She crossed the threshold of childhood and she emerged into the kingdom of monsters, and there was supposed to be an  _in between_.

Have a husband and a mortgage and your one short stretch of mortal bliss, here in this great human ignorance where murder does not smell of lust.

They grow up so quickly, these little girls who will never grow old.

She taps her pen against her book, and leans back a little in the chair she has pulled up to the desk she made Klaus and Stefan move into her bedroom one night some incalculable weeks ago, bossing them through a dozen different positions as Klaus tried to hit on her and Stefan had to purse his laugh behind his tightly-flattened lips, until a barked order put an end to  _that_ particular crap, the freaking  _incompetents_ , and Klaus fired back with some expectedly bitchy comment about his status as the great and powerful Lord of the Douche.

But you see she got her desk exactly where she wanted it.

She smiles to think of it, and she glances at her phone, with his name already drawn up on the face of it, but Tyler weighs so  _heavily_ , she trails him behind her everywhere she goes, and so she taps the center button and blacks out the entire screen and she leans forward with a frown, burying herself once more in her book.

"What are you doing?" someone asks from the balcony, and she whips around, heart hammering, and she lets fly with her pen, and without losing his smirk, Kol darts out his hand to catch it half an inch from his crotch.

She stares at him for one stunned moment.

He tosses it into the air and catches it deftly. "Really? You couldn't have aimed for my eye?"

She swallows her stomach slowly back down from her throat. "I figured of all the squishy spots you can stick a pen, that's the best one. That's what my mom taught me."

"Your mother's a sadist."

"She's a cop."

He tosses the pen again. "I never did like those very much. They always try to ruin my fun. The uniforms are very nice, though. Well, on the young…taut ones."

"Should you really be here?" she demands, twisting around in her chair to glare at him.

He straddles the railing of the balcony and leans back on one hand, giving the pen another toss.

He catches it behind his back and smiles.

"I'll keep an ear out for Nik. Much as he likes his dramatic entrances, I doubt he opens your nights of agile headboard smacking by scaling your hotel and popping up on your balcony like a psychopathic Romeo."

"You mean like you're doing right now?"

He smiles again.

The pen makes another loop through the air. "What are you doing?" he asks again.

"I'm reading Tom Barry's  _Guerrilla Days in Ireland_ , and trying to translate the tactics into some kind of modern day strategy."

"Nik can tell you all that."

"I know that. I want to figure it out for myself. There's not always going to be a boy around to hold my hand. Or…behead my enemies." She crosses her arms and leans her spine into the table, giving him an assessing squint of her eyes. "You look happy."

"I got laid. Several times, actually."

She shakes her head just a little, sliding her hand up to bury it in the hair at the nape of her neck. "So…I don't want to say 'I told you so', but I told you Tim had changed his mind about wanting to…"

"Hide the Irish sausage?"

"Read the Bible." She ducks her head and smiles mischievously up at him through her eyelashes. "That's what I spent all of my very chaste formative years doing."

"You sound like a bit of a slut. I like that in a person."

"Takes one to know one."

"Oh, I'm a horrible strumpet. But as you can see, I'm relaxed, and I have the glow of the fair virginal maiden who always gets sacrificed to the dragon. Can't say the same about you, darling. Not knocking boots with my brother?"

"Yes, actually, we just did it twice. While you were watching."

He lounges back on his elbows, stretching one leg out along the railing, his shirt pulling tight across his chest, which, congratulations to Tim, is pretty nicely defined for a homicidal firebug with a really super assy smirk on par with his big brother's.

She's not  _dead_ , ok.

Not…not-alive.

Not sans a fully-functioning vagina with an eye for muscley man boobs.

What _ever_.

"You cut Nik up pretty regularly with that tongue, don't you?"

"Only when he deserves it."

"He always deserves it."

"True," she admits, arching an eyebrow and draping an arm over the back of her chair.

"What are they up to?" he asks, looking out over the railing and off into the city so that she can't see how much the answer means to him, his throat twitching just a bit above the collar of his shirt, his wrists jumping with the pulse he cannot quite calm.

"Well, your sister likes to just randomly show up and barge into my hotel room with an armful of shopping bags and then demand that I watch her model all three thousand of the new outfits she's bought and tell her how pretty she looks in all of them and how glad I am that I have someone of her impeccable taste to emulate, so instead of keeping an ear out for Klaus, you should probably actually be listening for her. I get the impression she's trying to steal me from Klaus, actually. Klaus I've barely seen for the last couple of weeks, and Elijah is creepy and we don't really talk."

Kol starts to laugh. "You're sleeping with Nik but Elijah is frightening?"

She throws her hands up in the air. "Well…I don't know. He's just…like, kind of quiet. And he  _stares_ at me, like he's-"

"Judging you? He does that to everyone."

" _Assessing_ me. Like if I pair the wrong shoes with my outfit he'll eat me. At least Klaus telegraphs his murdery moments."

"Except for all those times he whips out his best polished English gentry smile and then casually pulls your intestines out through your mouth."

"Nope- I've got that covered too. If he's super polite, he's about to kill you. If he's super angry, he's about to kill you. If he makes a pun, it's a hint about how he's going to kill you. If he looks at me, it means he thinks I'm cute and is trying to decide whether he should sign off his diary as 'Mr. Caroline Forbes' or 'Mr. Caroline Forbes-Mikaelson'."

"Forbes-Mikaelson is too much of a mouthful. And not the good kind."

"I know. I'm gonna' push for 'Mr. Caroline Forbes'. Besides, you have to think of the children. 'Scarlett O'Hara-Hamilton-Kennedy-Butler-Forbes-Mikaelson is just not gonna' fly when I'm really pissed and have to use their full name. Speaking of which- Klaus needs a middle name. 'Klaus Mikaelson' is just not enough for some of his shittier moments."

"Proust," Kol suggests, and leans back on his elbow with such a smile.

"I'm guessing he had some kind of falling-out with him?"

"Never met him. Hated the shit out of him. Probably because Elijah thought his novel was 'positively genius' and Nik despises the positive reception of anything that isn't him. That, and he wrote his own novel and Elijah said he wouldn't wipe his ass with it if he were about to receive the Queen of England for tea and would have to suffer through all the usual dignitary niceties with his crack full of the shit still preferable to Nik's efforts. Well, he said it in his own Elijah way, but that was the gist of it. Did you know the first packaged toilet paper in the U.S. was produced by a man named Joseph Gayetty, who had his name printed on every sheet?"

She blinks. "Uh…no. But that's…interesting?"

He tilts his head and squints thoughtfully at her. "Would you want people to wipe their ass with your name?"

"I'd prefer they not wipe their ass with anything of mine. Can we change subjects, please?"

"Right," he says seriously. "On a scale of one to ten, one being unbelievable, and ten being 'Kol', what would you say my profile is, in the moonlight?" He turns his head helpfully back and forth.

She presses the laugh back down inside of her, and shakes her head. "What exactly are you doing here, Kol?"

* * *

He sees why Nik loves her.

Bit hard to not put your chin in your hands and give the stars in your eyes free run of your heart, when she laughs.

He thinks he'll be going soon, darling. Nik and Bekah have got their hands on you first, as they always snap up all the choicest bits, but he likes to think there was a little bit of sincerity in these moments.

So if-

If his story ends as always, with Nik not caring enough to work through this heap of old hurts accrued one on top of the other, as the centuries have stacked themselves-

He made his calls with a smile.

"Just wanted to check in on you. I was hoping you'd be naked," he says, and with a wink and a smile he swings his leg over the side of the balcony, and he drops straight to the pavement, to land with an instinctive flex of his knees, cracking his neck.

She's watching him over the railing, he can hear the creak of it beneath her, and the sigh of her breathing among the gusty bellows of this world that never falls silent with the immobile dark of a four a.m. morning for one such as him, but you don't look back at that, this too you shake off else it buries you, onward and forward, as nine centuries of making war upon time and death and love and all the things which will never thwart him permanently have taught him.

* * *

He stands over Sophie watching her breathe through her fitful slumber, his head cocked contemplatively.

In his hand her neck is such a small, small thing, and she starts up with a cry he squeezes to nothing, and for a moment they give one another that knowing glance of murdered and murderer, her feet drumming that last instinctive flailing of the victim, the sheets twisting beneath her, somewhere in his head the black satisfaction of imagining somewhere off in this sleepless city with all the noises of its life tapping always away at his window Caroline on her knees with a breathlessness she does not understand, crying out for God or mother or lover.

But none will save you.

Go on and stretch out your hand, love.

Feel that?

Nothing.

Yes, of course.

Nothing.

What else did you expect, for a monster's prayers to be answered, for the bloody  _heavens_ to cast wide their doors and hear the pleas of earth's abominations, for mother's soft bosom with the faint fog of her herbs in mute and welcoming presentation to the cheek which will never age beyond need of its comfort?

He presses Sophie back into her bed, straddling her as she sinks, his knees tight against the knobs of her hips, and to her chest goes his hand, have the heart out in a moment, love, don't worry, he'll be swift about it, a quick nip in and back out, you won't feel a thing, you won't feel a  _thing_ , Caroline, and isn't that more than can be  _bloody_ said for him-

But he lets up before his fingers have broken anything.

He lets up and staggers back as Sophie takes her first loud recovery rasp and he hasn't got a cheeky quip to his name, all of it stopped inside him with the abandonment of his brother, everything trembling as gods are not supposed to quake, the little shivers putting themselves all the way down to his gut with the seasick heaves that bring him almost to his knees, his forehead and his upper lip stippled with the damp of a man in his final throes, Sophie's frantic gasps not half so noisy as his own.

He has never let go of anything he can't have, Caroline.

And yet he slams the door.

Oh, sweetheart.

_Caroline_.

Of course he knew he could only hold on for so long, until came whatever inevitability to pry you away.

But he was hoping.

* * *

"Uhhh…1916. Yeah. That was just right before the Rising," Tim says, giving a squint to the photo in his hand and then taking a swig from the bottle sitting between them.

"Who are you with?"

"Kid named Sean McConnell. Horrible shithead. Just fucking- he was a cunt. One of the first casualties of that week, thank Christ."

He leans his head back against the wall and laughs. "And what did he fall to- a bullet or your pretty little mouth?"

"Oh, a bullet, yeah. Might have come out of me rifle, though. Tell you how hated he was- another fellow with me, Pat, he knew I'd done it, you can be fuckin' sure he did, and he just looked right the other way. Said it was a shame and all, with the old guns sometimes being a wee bit finicky like that, and discharging with nothing more than a little jostle." Tim takes another drink.

He smoothes his thumb over the edge of the photograph, Tim solemn in his kepi and his green trousers, the other lad turned from the camera, to show only his hairless young profile and the tuft of hair out the back of his own cap. "Were you in WWI?"

"Ah, no. Just spent me time kicking around Ireland all the way through the Civil War, kept on with the IRA after that, to Russia and France for a bit, then slipped down to Boston round about the 60s. Started running guns for the Winter Hill Gang."

He takes the bottle from Tim and smothers his laugh on the rim of it. "You're an awfully bad boy for such a nice, quiet young lad, Timothy. Little pissed, by the way, that Nik had me moldering in some coffin while you were off rubbing elbows with mobsters. What a load of shit that is."

Tim ducks his head with what's a rather adorably self-deprecating laugh. "Yeah, I was rather hot shit with those boys. Didn't say much, but I could shoot a man between the eyes from 300 yards off if I had to, without a shake in me hand. Fecking hunter brought a stop to all that in '67. He was hiding in the backseat of me car under some grocery crates full of pistols."

"Didn't you smell him?" he asks, tilting his head and giving the boy a squint of his eyes, the bourbon giving a noisy slosh in his otherwise empty stomach as he works his shoulders back into the wall, bottle dangling between his knees. He takes another long pull from it, and hands it back to Tim.

"Yeah." Tim drinks. "Picked him right up, but had one of those overconfident moments you get halfway through your first century or so, when you're finally settled into your own invincibility. Thought it was just some regular ol' fucker out to knife me. So I'm driving along the waterfront, thinking oh go on and give it a try, you cowardly bastard, and he pops up and he puts a gun to me head and makes it clear right quick that he's the thing stuffed full of wooden bullets. So I jerk the wheel hard as I fuckin' can, and the fecker slips, and off goes his gun, into the windshield and not me head, thankfully, and I try to elbow him in the cheek, but the fucker's a lot quicker than I expected, and stronger to boot, lucky me, and he's trying to shoot me again, so I just give the wheel another crank and put the pedal practically through the fuckin' floor, and off the side of the road we go, into the bay. Left him to drown and skipped town; wasn't sure if there were more where he came from."

He has got that first flush of drink in his cheeks, his chatter full of all his stripped inhibitions, something of a motor mouth is Tim, in those initial moments before the fifth or sixth round sets in and he's nothing for contribution but giggles light as a girl's.

He leaves off this tale with another drink, and makes a face. "This tastes like shit. Where the fuck did you get it?"

"It tastes fine to me. Maybe it's your face; there's something wrong with it that's interacting poorly with the flavor." He darts in blindingly and crushes his lips to Tim's, Tim crawling half into his lap in drunken enthusiasm, the kiss going a bit violent with teeth and the hold Tim has got on the collar of his shirt, till he sets the boy back with his hands on his cheeks and gives him his shittiest smile. "Definitely something wrong with your face."

"Fuck you, you drunken little shite," Tim says, nipping his shoulder roughly, and he prizes the bottle from Tim's fingers and he gets to his feet with it in his hand, knocking back a good draught.

"Let's go light something on fire."

"What about your 'insatiable meat wand'?"

" _Literally_?"

Tim gains his feet a bit unsteadily, laughing till he has to catch hold of his side. "I meant hormonally."

"Did you read another of those awful Fabio the Meat Stud novels, with the blowing hair and the chiseled abs, and the complete and utter disregard for anatomical feasibility?"

Tim grabs him roughly by the hips and kisses him hard enough to bruise. "I love it when you say things like 'anatomical feasibility'," he breathes with such an exaggerated smolder in his eyes they have to separate to laugh, Tim carrying on long after he's calmed, with the tears just rolling down his cheeks as he bends helplessly at the waist to wheeze out his mirth. "Oh God, oh  _God_ \- she carries round his musty spunk rag and takes a good whiff of it every time she's to remind herself that their connection's all in her head and to prove his love-" He drops into a crouch and sinks his head down onto the arms he folds over his knees, just bloody hysterical, not a bit of him left out of this all-over quiver his laughter's put him into. "He rips off- he rips off all his fuckin' clothes and he fetches himself off till she- till she's finally bought the truth of their 'faerie fated connection', and then she tears off her own bleedin' gown, and she chases him down as he's trying to climb birthday feckin' naked out her window."

"What the  _hell_ are you on about, mate?" he asks, choking on his next drink, spraying the whole of it halfway across the room.

"This fuckin' book- oh fuck me," Tim gasps, and he crawls over to his bed and digs round under his pillow till out he comes with some cheap paperback with its hero well and properly sweat-oiled and stallion-maned, lobbing it to him with another burst of laughter that nearly does him in, till he has to fall backwards onto his bed, hands to his forehead. "Read what I've bookmarked."

He sets the bourbon on the nightstand beside the bed, and gives a theatric flap of his wrist, flipping the book open. "She sat on the side of her bed holding something in her hands. He identified the black and red cloth as a ladies' lace-trimmed handkerchief, but could not understand the evil that emerged from it to batter him across the pane of glass he peered through. She shook it out straight in front of her and stared at it intently, but without seeing it. It was then that he noticed the monogram and identified the "S" as belonging to Sorcha."

Tim sticks his fist in his mouth.

He gives a dramatic clear of his throat and reads on. "It brought back part of the night that nearly ended his future. The memory had either been obscured by the witch's potion, washed away in the alcohol he tried to drown himself in or simply erased as being too painful to handle. It was what he knew she saw so he forced himself to go back and stand beside her at the hedge leading into the garden. He was embedded in the witch, filling her with lust brewed by her black magic. Sorcha reached inside her bodice and drew out the cloth, this handkerchief. She bent down to where her body held his and swabbed the black fabric with the rancid refuse of their joinder. She'd tossed it to the ground at Heather's feet with a comment that it was all of Nial she'd ever have. He'd looked up as Heather bent to pick up the vile thing. As she straightened, the glint of moonlight had caught the fold of her eyes. Heather put the handkerchief to her nose and sniffed. Nial shouted "NO" at the top of his lungs as he opened and plunged through the window in a single motion."

Tim is crying again.

"Is she really-"

"Carrying round a handkerchief full of old love juice? Fuck me, she is," Tim gasps, wiping his eyes. "Flip forward a bit. Right after he rips off all his fuckin' clothes; start reading there. But do it in the voice of one of those really upbeat game show hosts."

He sniffs and gives a little stutter of a cough, priming his vocal cords with a quick scale that sends Tim into another round of those giggles.

"Buttons were beyond barbarians too, so he ripped at his pants and tore them in his eagerness to free the most beastly part of him!"

Tim turns over onto his stomach and buries his face in the bed.

"Turn back over, you little asshole. You'll miss the hand gestures that go along with it."

"I can't," Tim gasps into the covers, and so he flashes over to the bed and he flips Tim himself, then lets himself down onto the boy's hips, holding the book in one hand as he pins Tim's wrists over his head with the other.

"I'm just going to skip ahead to the really good parts, shall I…throws the handkerchief into the fire…prattles on about black magic and faerie banishment…here we are. He cupped his hands around the hard that rode his stomach, holding it out for her inspection! He watched as she surveyed his turgid arousal and awaited the moment when her anger and insecurity changed to desire! Let's see, quickening breath, nipples like rocks…He had summoned the woman! His need throbbed before her, open, unvarnished, and magnetically alluring! Is his cock usually varnished? Anyway, she can't look away, of course…As she watched, his hand moved up and down the organ he held, and a single drop of liquid desire emerged from the tip!"

He leans down and kisses Tim's neck. "She stared at the pearly drop," he kisses the other side of Tim's neck, "seeing male passion in pure undiluted form. It couldn't be imitated or produced at will." He tips himself forward till he's propped on an elbow, holding the book upright, and gives Tim a slow roll of his hips.

"Don't, you fucker. Don't be turnin' me on to this. I'll never be able to look myself in the eye again, if I pitch me trousers during it."

"She threw off her gown and ran to him. He had one leg outside the window and one inside when he felt her bare breasts at his back." He kisses Tim's throat and the underside of his chin. "Nial, I love you. Don't leave me! Don't go!" he hollers, and spasms his face as if in some great pain, flailing awkwardly away with his hips at Tim till the boy's hysterical again. "He turned but it was the beast that lunged for her!"

"Oh, get off me. Get off me, you shittin'- shitter," Tim demands through his gasps, and he flings the book away at last and lets up on Tim's wrists, smiling as he springs up off the bed.

"So do you want to go set something on fire?"

Tim gives him a pointed look. "Yeah, fuck- let's do it. Got something real specific in mind."

"Don't be like that, Timothy," he says, and then he takes a peek at one of the watches he pinched from Nik along with the coat he has left in a careless puddle on Tim's floor, gives it a loud snap, flicks it in a blurred circle with a whip of his wrist. "Actually, I've got a bit of business to attend for the moment. I'll see you in a bit?"

Tim sits up and dangles his hands between his knees, knocking his hat off his head to put one hand back through his hair. "Where are you off to?"

"Now, that I can't reveal. It's a bit better for all your internal organs if you don't know what I'm up to in my extracurricular time. Nik'll think you're caught up in it yourself if I start spilling all the juicy details. Nothing terribly interesting about it anyway. Mayhem, murder, magic- just the usual."

There's a bit of tension in the boy's shoulders as he carefully replaces his hat, tugging on the brim of it to settle it just so over his eyes. He's careful with his voice when he speaks, but not so his eyes, sharp enough to get the bile up in his throat. "I don't give a fuck what Klaus thinks."

He looks away with a strained smile and a scratch of his neck. "Everyone cares what Nik thinks, Tim. If you don't keep an eye to it, you get your heart ripped out."

"Maybe we shouldn't all spend our time tiptoeing round his fucking temper tantrums."

"You're the one who didn't want to leave with me because you knew he'd set out after us."

"And I said I regretted it, and I didn't want to base my life round his fucking wet nappy anymore. And I think you've spent enough time doing just exactly that." Tim stands with his hands in his pockets, the anger up in his cheeks, his forearms standing out nicely just below the muddle of his sleeve cuffs, rolled in the beginning stages of his happy inebriation.

He feels his own hot wash of anger, the prick of it in his throat and the curdling discomfort of his gut gone to froth, but he doesn't see a need to quarrel, not when he's already bricked himself into this new stage of death with his family obscured by an indifference solid as the partition of that mystical veil. "I'm going to forget you're trying to take a poke at my obvious manliness and your subtle implications about cowardice."

"That's not what I said."

"That's why I said you implied it." He keeps his eyes very steadily on Tim's. "Pass me my coat."

Tim throws it so hard the entire bundle of it unfurling in his arms would have carried a lesser man off his feet.

"I'm just fucking tired of him is all, Kol. And he'll give a tweak of the leash one day, I know he will, and off you'll go right back to him-"

"Just like you, isn't that right?" He wrestles the coat upright in his arms and shoves his arms through the sleeves. "Fucked him for three years, got yourself a nice round of sloppy seconds when he decided he didn't want you anymore, then saw him across a crowded street decades later, and went back for more. Despite everything you knew about him."

Tim runs a hand down his chin, and there's a real thunder on his brow now, his voice pinched as his eyes when he manages to grapple it at last from his throat. "Don't you fuckin' say that. You know that's not true."

"It's true you went back to him, and now you want to stand here and puff your chest and talk to me about striking out as your own man, and fuck the consequences."

"I'm sayin' to you that he's a fuckin' miserable cunt, is your brother, and I'm done jumpin' his bleedin' hoops all so I can get meself shot and strangled and hunted like a feckin' rat, all for doing just as he told me!" Tim snaps.

" _Well you can't quit_!" he screams, and for a moment they just stand in the wake of this, he panting, Tim wide-eyed. "You can't quit now, Tim," he says with more restraint, after a breath and a pinch of the bridge of his nose. "Nik will kill you. You said earlier you'd wait till he forgot about you-"

"He'll kill me while I'm waiting round for him to forget about me, at the rate he's going. I'm useful, but I'm not indispensable, Kol. No one is, for him. And I don't want to wait anymore, and you've been hanging round for nine whole  _fucking_ centuries, waitin' for this piece of shit to notice you just for your own goddamn self, Kol, and not because he's need of you, and Jesus Mary and fucking  _Joseph_ forbid you try to cut the bloody apron strings when he hasn't given his grand fuckin' highness' permission."

He stares at Tim for a long moment.

You spit in Nik's eye and you fire your cowboy bravado from the hip, and Nik takes these six smoking rounds to the chest and he tilts his head and he laughs at your insurrection, as he has always found the amusement in all such rebellions, and then round your heart go his indifferent fingers, and perhaps this time he will while away his grief for ten centuries, in that coffin to which Nik will surely banish him, and perhaps in a thousand years he will emerge purged at last of all his human failings with the pointiest of them bristling in his heart, but do you remember- you remember you wanted to  _live_?

So in your bleakest moments you swung yourself from a rafter and you swallowed the cold black mouth of your revolver and in the April rain of an Ireland still clearing the fog of its revolution from streets shot to the first crumbles of creation you let the British execute you like a man- it was all of it just one long cry for help.

A man is always too young to die, with the world out there before him.

The silence has taken a chunk out of Tim's audacity, as silence always does, and he shifts round on his feet now and his lashes try to blink out the terror in his eyes, because what a long stretch of quiet from the youngest Mikaelson, and a decent man would give the boy a squeeze and a stroke of his hair and tell him don't worry, this love I bear you is not weaker than truth's offense, but he is not decent, he buried that a long time ago, next to the mother he didn't love enough to forsake her murderer, he is not  _good_  Tim, and he is afraid.

So he says, "Do whatever you like, Tim. Get yourself killed. The funeral certainly won't put a snarl in traffic, after all."

And the look the boy gives him.

The years have put their dents in him, certainly.

But he was such a soft-souled thing, when once the decades counted down his breaths.

Rather like this boy he used to know.

Happy thing.

Used his smiles sometimes as a mask, but did not forget that joy is a worthwhile thing, and no man the less for celebration of it, by jest or laugh or tear.

"Well, go on and get out," Tim snaps, and turns his head to wipe his nose surreptitiously, with the slyness of a boy not about to get caught out crying on the playground. "And just- fuck off. You and your brother both. If I'd just never met the whole crazy fuckin' lot of you."

You're not wrong, Tim.

Here's cowardice for you: he can't stand to watch his own grief play itself out so sharply on Tim's face, so he just turns, and he leaves.

* * *

He lets the fecker get a good twenty minutes or so into his head start, just flinging himself moodily round his hotel and flipping the pages of his books idly like he's to get any reading done in this state, and then into his pocket with his revolver and the cap pressed down low round his ears, and out into the muggy evening where somewhere in this southern in-between of winter/summer the fuckin' eejit's goin' round with that coat and the great collar on it pulled up round his cheekbones to cook the looks right off him.

Spot him by the fuckin' shine of him, the gom.

The soldiers are nearly elbow to elbow, this side of town, so he is sure to smile politely and give the boyos a brisk nod, just passing through, no eye for any trouble, young thing like him with the look of the choir, and he hops up onto the sidewalk and idles along with his hands casually in his pockets, his thumb giving a lover's caress to the sights of the pistol, his eyes skinned for the tailored cut of that jacket with the hemline to the calves.

Nice bloody night. The clouds with their eyes shut up and not a hint of rain, though of course the sky weighs on him like some bleedin' inverted river blotting out God's domain. The fuckin' south. Don't know why he toils away in this broth, man like him with Ireland's cold mists all through him thick as the blood.

Better than the summers what bake a man primordial, drying all his fluids to dust, he supposes. Used to dunk his head in the sink for a good few minutes of paradise, in that Alexandrian flat he took up somewhere round '69, holding his breath longer than any man, just letting the water float the strands of his hair gently up off his neck.

Fecking beautiful, though, the old mosques like great Indian palaces, with the spires holding onto the last of the sun.

Oh, sure, then, is that really the kind of chatter he wants just circling and circling him till he's nearly forgot what's put the thickness in his throat- Alexandria with her blue hands giving their throttle to the neighbor's wicked eye and the sand in every crevice of him?

And those boys standing round with their guns and their slurs, and his new friend head of them all.

Right.

He gives a little tug to his collar, takes a corner, snaps his head round when some dark-haired fellow appears just ahead.

Down the next alley he pursues the fellow, then a glimpse of his profile and he's in a bit of a spot, the awkwardness between them heavy as a man, the blue eyes giving him the run-over and the smooth chin drawing up as the lips thin themselves disapprovingly, and his throat just stoppered with the voice caught somewhere helplessly below as he pockets his hands.

"Can I  _help_ you, bro?" the man snaps.

"Ah, no. Sorry. Thought you were someone else."

He turns on his heel and slips back out into the tourists, and sure and it's a fecking stupid undertaking anyway, with these twenty minutes long between them, and any manner of mischief and miles put away in that time, but, oh, he knows the bastard didn't mean it.

And it'll fester in him, with his family on the other side of the cannons, staring down their indifferent rifles.

But a scouring of the next several streets and he's got nothing for his troubles but some raucous drunks arguing their way into a titty bar, and so a sigh and a lowering of his heart and he plunks himself down on the roof of some old clunker parked down a quiet side street and he shakes out a fag for a good nervous smoke.

"Fuck me," he mumbles round it as his lighter gives a troublesome sputter and then reluctantly touches a bright tendril to the end of his fag.

He snaps it shut with a loud click and buries it once more in his vest pocket, exhaling a gray breath into the sky.

Well, now, give him a moment- the Monteleone is always a favorite old haunt, but he'd keep his nose clean of that, with his brother's same fondness for the old hotel, and the house, of course, won't find him within blocks of that, or anywhere's got a whiff of the whole lot of them-

He gives another puff and props his feet on the lip of the window, sinking his elbows onto his knees.

Stubborn shite bastard. Stayed just a moment longer and he might have taken a swing, but a good brawl always knocks the loneliness right out of a man.

* * *

The mayor's house looks very lovely tonight, with the moon draped very nicely about the roof.

No lights on.

All the hearts mired in that molasses of sleep, just ticking leisurely along.

He rips the wiring from the burglar alarm.

Do you know, darling-

He thinks he wants them to hear him coming.

He kicks the door open.

* * *

Crack of the guns somewhere up the road, and he smokes his fag nonchalantly into the warm New Orleans night and reaches with his free hand into the pocket of his trousers, to feel up the lump of his gun.

Prickle of life in his fingertips and his chest only when by the skin of his teeth he has escaped with it into the night, which ought to say a right Christ fecking thing about little Timothy O'Sullivan with the smile like dawn, as his ma used to say.

He hops down from the car and into the shine of winter making her escape from the sidewalks he taps the ash of his fag.

Leisurely does it, lad, with the hands in the pockets and the fag going from one cheek to the other, and a quick nip up to the buttons of his vest, to air the nerves from his clammy chest.

And now the guns dying off for a moment and then a whole new barrage banging round his hypersensitive head, and the city giving it right back with a howl to wake the sleepers in their caskets.

Shriek of a mother, that one.

You can always tell.

"Need some identification, sir," one of the men from the barricade up ahead of him barks, and for a moment he thinks of the license with the name not his own in the crook of his wallet, but with the blood up in him, is that any way to handle a mere three of them?

He lets off a great gray steam from the fag and shoots the man through the head, and with the second in easy reach of him, he stretches out his hand and he snaps the neck in a blink, then round to the front of him he hauls the fucker, to take the bullets of his leftover comrade.

Are you after emptying your whole magazine into the poor fucker, then? Get a tongue lashing like a fuckin' interrogation by the bloody Black and Tans for a waste like that, in the war.

He lets the soldier finish whatever it is he thinks he's accomplishing, and then into either kneecap he fires his revolver, and down the lad goes, howling all the way, his gun clattering on away down the street.

"Did a man come by this way? Few inches shorter then me," he hovers his hand round his chin, "brown hair, brown eyes? Wearin' a black coat to his calves?"

"I don't know; I don't know," the boy wheezes. "Oh God, oh fucking  _God_ -"

Ah, well. Thought he'd try.

Good lad, for giving it a go anyway.

He spits out his fag and ends the fellow's screams with a .45 between the eyes.

* * *

The mayor has a gun.

He'll shoot.

"Please do, darling," he says, and rips the bedroom door off the hinges to cast a slow judgmental look taught him by the best -such a lovely little cunt, his darling sister- over this man and his woman huddling in their bed, just soaked with fear.

The mayor opens fire.

He laughs.

He lets the woman make it through the doorway, shrieking all the way, but the man he kills on his bed, and what to use, he remembers thinking as he walked with heavy heart and his boots just lightly tripping along, he's in the mood for something a touch different, no less personal than the hands, of course, this is to be a dirty one, and so a quick pop round the kitchen for the most well-maintained of their implements and here he is, darling, he hopes you like it.

He hacks off the arms and legs as the man is still noisily conscious, no use in stabbing the gleam from his eyes before all that, of course not, there's no pleasure in butchering a corpse, too quiet, it's really the screams that make or break it, darling.

The children are crying downstairs.

He listens to them scamper into their mother's arms where she presses their heads softly to her breast and she breathes in her voice tightened by fear, shh, shh, it'll be all right, daddy's fine, and he remembers his own mother with her arms made of tenderness and sound sleep, to paraphrase one of Nik's favorites, and he cuts off their father's head.

"Marco!" he calls playfully down the stairs as the woman, quietly as she can, urges her children to their feet and herds them along in front of her, tiptoeing along with great care, her footsteps like landmines.

He runs his bloody hand along the banister as he descends, dragging his finger along the railing like he might caress a cherished cheek (he finds it really draws out the suspense), the knife drip drip dripping at his side, quite nice, just the right amount of atmosphere, Mother and her noisy offspring hiccupping out their fear in a huddle beneath the kitchen table.

"Marco!" he calls again. "You're supposed to say 'polo', darling. We can't play if you don't follow the rules."

She tiptoes toward the window with her children in tow, and he smiles as he listens to her wrench at the bloody thing, sticking as they always do in times of need such as this.

"Hello," he says from the entrance of the kitchen, and she screams before she even turns round.

He likes that sort of recognition; go on and take a peek at what's in his hand and all over his shirt and see if you can't do it again, darling.

Wonderful.

"Did you ever hear of Sergei Ryakhovsky? Probably not; not as mainstream as Ted Bundy or that Green River fellow. Anyway. I wanted to do something…" He rolls his wrist thoughtfully. "Artistic. Say what you want about those particular types of humans, but they were very creative."

He cracks his neck as the woman clutches her children about her.

"I called the police," she whispers, and he watches a bit of urine straggle down her leg, out the hem of her pajama bottoms.

"Lovely. Do you think they'd want to play?" he asks, spinning his knife. "Doubt it; professionals are terribly boring. I bet your husband was a real snore," he says, and at this use of past tense she shuts her eyes and she pulls her children in tighter, her mouth opening in that silent sob of the truly bereaved.

He tosses the knife to his other hand and spins it again. "Who wants to go first? Promise I'll leave the evisceration for the post-mortem part; I'm not a monster," he assures them all, and drops his fangs.

* * *

Nothing to show for his two hour tramp about the Quarter but half a pack of fags got down to the filter, so back to his hotel with him and his heavy shoulders, but wouldn't you bloody know it- fucker's sulking about on the end of his bed in the dark, head down, hands clasped between his knees.

He pockets his hands, heart just winging away into his throat.

Kol looks up at him, sneaking the glance from beneath his eyebrows, leaving his head down and his hands still tightly knotted. "I'm sorry for what I said earlier. I was a shit."

He drops his head to give his boots a good squint of the eyes, keeping his hands in his pockets. "What about you?" Kol asks him, and he darts a look up same as the one the little shit is still slipping him, covering up his smile with a tired rub of his hand along his jaw.

"What do you mean what about me?" he asks, rocking forward on his toes and lifting both his brows. "Do you mean for two hours was I wandering round looking for some bloody eejit fecking round in his winter coat on a shorty shorts and suntan lotion night?"

"It adds dramatic flair. Shorty shorts don't flair about your ankles while you're murdering on the go." Kol unlaces his hands and sits looking down at them for a moment. "Speaking of which. I left a bit of a mess that's really going to piss Nik off. It's probably best we leave off for a bit."

Well, he'll tell you what he thinks of that, Mikaelson.

He takes out his phone.

"Tim."

He gives it a squeeze with his hand, and the screen gives a great crack and fractures, the innards poking loose their little odds and ends here and there round the whole thing.

"Tim." Kol runs a thumb over the dimple in his chin. "Go back to Nik and tell him you dropped the bloody thing and you need another."

Away across the room it sails, into the far wall.

Back into his pocket goes his hand, with his friend just staring up at him, the strands of his bangs intruding a bit on his eyes, his hands back in their anxious knot.

"Come on, then. Round up me books, would you? I've got most of me clothes and weapons already packed up." He gives a little kick to the instep of Kol's boot. "You're not tearin' up the Quarter without me."

"He'll find us eventually. No matter what," Kol says quietly behind him as he sets to work gathering up his rucksack with its pockets bulged to the limits, giving the front a quick feel-up for his speed loaders.

"So you'd rather just be alone then? Until he comes for you with his dagger?" he asks, swinging round with the rucksack dragging down the right side of him, and his friend just sitting there on that bed, saying nothing, the shame of that pulling his eyes to his toes, and all the weight of this long and lonesome unlife just sagging everything that's yielding in a man.

Ah, he knows, you smooth fecker, trying to tuck everything away where it won't be noticed.

No shame in needing, you hear him? It wasn't anything was done to him, drove him to the noose or the bullet or that one afternoon tumble off the Cliffs of Moher and into the water that snatched the breath clean out of him soon as he came to.

It's not what man does, puts the despair in any ancient old chest.

It's what he stands alongside and he allows.

So let him not stand idly by, you hear? Let him not stew safely in his cowardice, imagining to himself all the things he surely would have done, by God, if he'd just been given the chance.

"Do you want the book with the shirtless man flipping his waist-length hair about, or the one with the shirtless man flipping his shoulder-length hair about?" Kol asks, and stands with his hands in his pockets.

And, oh, the smile this gives him, not that little lip service to the emotions, but just…fecking all of him, the lift of everything.

He grabs the back of Kol's neck and swoops in for a kiss he plants roughly on his forehead, and then he pulls back and he makes for the door with that rucksack banging his hip, walking backward as he points to his friend. "Both of them, of course. I haven't even read any of the second to you yet."

Kol throws it at him.

He blurs through the unzipping of his rucksack and catches it in the main pouch. Kol tosses the second from underneath his leg, and in on top of the first it goes,  _Great Expectations_ following with a discus spin, and on its heels his worn copy of  _War and Peace_ and  _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ , and now him darting about after them like a caddy rattling after balls, and Kol giving a little skip of a step and shot putting  _The Brothers Karamazov_ straight at him.

"Hey! Don't be doing that, you little shit! You'll take me fuckin' head off!" he protests, deflecting the book with his rucksack and catching it before it can hit the floor. Kol blurs up beside him, coat over his arm, and slings his free arm round his neck as he turns to open the door.

"All right," Kol says, surveying the hall with a slow turn of his head. "Let's break everything."

* * *

"A frantic 911 call brought authorities to Mayor Duncan's house late last night where investigators stumbled across a scene straight out of a horror movie," she hears from inside the house as she walks briskly up the sidewalk, curls bouncing, and a shattering of something breakable and she pauses, slipping her hands into her pockets. "-pinned to the wall with one of the posts from his bed and the quote "Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom" written beside him in what appears to be the mayor's own blood. The quote can be attributed to Marcel Proust and mirrored a similar quote, also by Proust, left on the floor of the kitchen where Mayor Duncan's slaughtered wife and children were discovered-"

"It's bloody  _Kol_ , Elijah, you know that!" Klaus screams, and then another crash and a slew of expletives she doesn't normally hear from him and suddenly the phone she has tucked into her inner jacket pocket begins to vibrate, buzzing against her ribs. Well what a nice coincidence,  _unknown number_ , you stupid  _freaking_ idiot, God there aren't  _words_ -

"What did you  _do_?" she snaps into the phone as soon as she has blurred far enough down the sidewalk to be out of earshot, walking on like any old normal human out for a stroll now as she buries one hand in her curls, heels clicking purposefully. "Klaus is  _apocalyptic_. He's going to kill you, Kol, and if Tim is anywhere near you right now and not heading for the house right this very instant so Klaus can see his super surprised face because what Kol's in town of course I didn't know that do I look like I have a literal  _death wish_ , he's going to rip his head off too, and I don't know if I can talk him down from that. I'm just cute, I'm not God, who, by the way, probably couldn't talk Klaus out of it either, because did I mention he's in full-blown  _genocidal_ mode right now?"

* * *

Nik is being an insufferable twat, so she sets out down the sidewalk in search of Caroline, studying her nails as she goes, when what a coincidence, dear brother.

It's been a while.

His voice is sieved through that annoying little buzzing of even the best of connections, a bit muted with distance, but of course she'd know any of them anywhere, even Nik with that one atrocious beard he grew somewhere round the 12th century because he decided it would make him positively menacing and he was still grasping round for the reputation he would need to build murder by horrific murder.

But do you know what she really enjoys?

The second participant of this conversation.

Quite interesting.

She cocks her head and smiles.

Oh, Caroline. What will she do with this?

* * *

Best place for an ambush, Kol tells him, so here he is, lying with his belly to the slates of some roof across the way, the Mikaelson manor angling up into the blue spring trying to nose her way into this March morning, Kol's bloody coat spread out over top of him, the fucker itching like a bloody fecking hooker's lousey cunt, his breath sketching out a thin cigar strand in the air has not yet had the day baked into it.

Check he's got his pistol to semi-auto, brace his feet against the shingles, screw down his eye so he's funneled all his vision down through that little circle, and don't you forget to breathe, you fucker, with the nerves going through you like the very plates of the earth themselves giving a great shrugging of their shoulders-

He wipes one of his hands down his trousers and returns his fingers to the stock.

Bloody prick going numb, squashed as it is for the last four bleedin' hours on this fecking roof.

Please Christ, by all that's holy, preserve his head and his boys.

Not sure which in the more danger, with everything down there with the touch of frostbite, and should he give a whisper to the lad, then, hiss over to him can he feel his whatsit, and should he be feeling the touch of concern?

He wets his lips.

Well don't laugh at him, now, but he can't feel a bleedin'  _thing_ , and of course nothing's permanent on a man like him, but what if he's stopped up the blood long enough the fecker's gone and died on him?

Kol's hip nudges his own and he takes another breath quiet as he can and he steadies his aim and adjusts himself best as he can and knows what he's up to, Kol does, because you can see the goddamned bastard tamping down his laughter, so into his ribs he pops a quick elbow and a quick flicker of the middle finger and he settles back down with the sights glued afresh to his eye, and now down the sidewalk they come.

Ways off, still.

But he hears them stamping along like those long ago soldiers he used to listen for, crouching in Mrs. O'Reilly's attic with the wet Irish winter all round him and the boys feeling it as he never did, shivering alongside him, pistols balanced on their thighs.

Kol gives his head a little bop with his own, and leaves it there.

He puts his eyes quickly over all three of the men, and sure enough they were all of them partners of his for one outing or another, varying degrees of useful, the one on the left a particularly competent little bitch, probably stepped in to take his place in these last few days of his absence.

Klaus will miss a minion like that.

God rest your undead soul, boyo, and may you rot in the deepest dregs of special hell for that night a few months back.

You know what he's talking about, you utter shitrag.

He opens fire as they reach the door, rattling off with his precise three round bursts into each of their backs, the brass kicking out over Kol's head to tink off the roof and the stock landing him a gentle nudge as he digs in with his boots, the walls of the neighborhood giving him back the echo of the shots and somewhere off in one of the houses a woman screaming and now a scent of blood on the air and the thundering of boots on the stairs inside the manor, and down he swings his barrel to tuck it along his side as he rolls to the side, right over the edge of the roof he reels, Kol half a heartbeat after him, and the door exploding open only a breath later, and the scent of that fucker mingling with the blood now, smells like unwashed ass, your aftershave,  _mate_ , and by God if he had the sack to say that to your face-

Kol shoulders aside a man out for a jog with his dog, one of those sturdy John Wayne types with his heart full of action heroes and none of the blood left in his wee little brain, all of it in his fists, for he reaches out a hand like a hammer and he catches him by the lapels of his coat to give him a great shake.

"Help! Call the police! I've got the little asshole!" he screams, and a knock to his jaw and down the man goes, spraying teeth everywhere, he hurtling the fellow as he falls, the coat snapping about behind him, Kol's fingers all tangled up in his sleeve now as he jerks them at a dead sprint for the busy intersection into which they burst, the few motorists not yet caught sight of his gun blasting away with their horns.

He ditches it on the sidewalk with a noisy rattle and follows Kol across the bonnet of a car has screeched itself to a dead halt in the street, leaps onto the roof of the next one over, and there now on the corner one of the NOPD's finest working himself up into a great lather, hollering and usnapping his holster as he runs, and traffic dividing all around them and going to their smushed ends into one another's backs, Kol skidding across another bonnet and touching down on the street as the copper lets loose with his Glock, putting three into his friend's chest before a casual shove of the man's face just bleedin' erupts him all over the sidewalk, his poor old head hits it that hard.

Kol shoulders his way through a crowd mostly parts for him aside from those few gawpers can't scrape their jaws off the ground long enough to let their instincts carry them off with a shriek, and through some little gift shop with the smelly lady's things fair choking them both they burst, overturning the stands with their little ribboned soaps, the sweat bristling all round the band of his cap and the collar of his coat and the tail of this bloody thing flaring out behind him as he takes a dive over the counter and rolls to his feet as the sirens begin their lamentations, the whole city just coming alive round them now, with the sharp perfume of the panic and the uniformed lads pounding away to their lorries, the hearts in them like rabbits.

Round the back of the shop and a quick pop up over a dumpster and onto the roof of the next building and they teeter-totter their way along, arms out for balance as they sprint along the thin spine of the roof, then a hop off the end and a hand to the air draws them both to a stop as Kol throws out his little feelers, centuries beyond his own, his brow with the little wrinkle that adds a year or three to his smooth young face.

He flips the collar of his coat nervously as he waits, popping himself onto his toes, giving a quick jerk of his hat.

Kol gives him a smile like to burst his heart right here on the spot.

Round his shoulder goes an arm and an exaggerated press of the lips to the side of his head just below his cap that he makes the fucker work for, leaning his neck far as it will go, scrunching up his face as the kiss is landed anyway, wet as you please, Kol chafing it into his cheek with his fingers.

"Go on and fuck yourself," he says amicably, but he keeps the arm around his neck as they amble off down the little back lane, and he lifts his arm to slide his fingers through the ones dangling down over his shoulder.

* * *

Tim seats himself next to the little red-haired one with her pint halfway to her lips. "Charise," he says in that soft accent sends the shivers right up his spine, and she gives him a side dart of her eyes and she sets down her pint and this one's no mindless automaton of Nik's, for she gauges the exit with another flicker of her eyes and brushes her fingers casually over a side pocket of her jacket with the interior reeking of steel and wood.

"Jesus Christ, Tim. Where the hell have you been?" she asks, and that's his cue, darling.

He wouldn't want to miss it.

He positions himself smiling at her elbow. "With me, darling."

And the look in her eyes.

But give her credit.

She fights Tim all the way into the alleyway behind the bar while he lingers for a moment to bash in the bartender's head before the man has reached the '1' in his sweaty emergency call, that big hand of Tim's just engulfing her mouth as he wrestles her through the back door.

Tim holds her while he twirls the leg of one of the bar stools, and oh, she kicks and she spits and she claws, the fiery little thing, and Tim breathing through his nose trying not to get himself all worked up as he always is by the fighters.

He stabs her once, not very deep, watches Tim's eyes flicker at the scent of blood, gives her another swipe, the girl aiming a boot for his testicles, Tim putting his back into it now as she twists and arches up and tries to put her elbow straight through his gut, and another stab and he smiles, he twirls the stool leg, he meets Tim's eyes over her shoulder.

Few veins under them now, and the flush in his cheeks, the lashes coming down to squeeze themselves a tight prayer, and then up again as she takes another thrust to the chest and tries to bite through Tim's hand.

"Oh for Christ's sake, finish her off," Tim says roughly, and if he had Nik's dimples, this is right about when he'd burrow them deep as they go, but he thinks his own smile will do quite nicely.

He angles the stool leg up into her heart.

Tim drops the girl into a dry gray pile at his feet.

He steps over her and gets his nails into Tim's back and his fangs in his neck, and the way the boy just  _stiffens_ against him, one hand going helplessly to the back of his head, his lips opening on a gasp he's not quite the breath to utter.

He shoves Tim back into the wall and bites into his carotid hard enough to spurt it halfway up his neck, Tim's fingers tearing the hair from the nape of his neck and his breath going sharp in his throat, his head just lazily lolling as he tries to turn his grip on that hair into a caress and has instead to gather it up once more in a clench rough enough to hurt quite deliciously.

Into the hole he has torn goes his tongue, and then he flicks it up over the lip of the wound and runs it along the line of blood Tim's already healing carotid has sprayed to the earlobe, giving it just enough of a prick with his fangs to draw another few spots of red.

He pulls away with a smile and saunters on back into the bar ahead of Tim, who has quite the flurry of abuse for him, the dirty-mouthed little thing.

Have to spank him for that.

* * *

"Who are we waiting for?" the tall blonde wants to know, and he folds his hands and he smiles, so patiently, quite kind of him, really, when you consider this inconsequential has no right to be poking about for anything.

"I've things to see to elsewhere, but there's a very important informant I need the two of you to keep your eyes skinned for. He ought to swing round here any time now, if his nerves haven't failed him. Just put your boots up, lads, and have yourselves a nice little rest."

He puts up the collar on his jacket when he exits the pub in which he leaves these little choice bits of meat, and down the road he saunters, smiling at the officers out for their patrols, hands to their pistols, and a squint for every man whiling away his final free moments as the clock ticks round toward curfew.

Good lads.

But a martyr for every cause, gentleman.

He thanks you for your sacrifice.

* * *

Breath up in Kol's throat, and the pair of them hammering all over with their nerves, cutting it close as they are.

He takes a swig of his coffee and ambles away down the street like all the dark nooks and crannies of it with the enemies lurking anywhere are his for the taking, putting into his step that authoritative swagger what gains every man with the issuance of his metal pecker snug in its holster, and beside him Kol gives a tweak to his stolen badge and brushes the lint from his sleeve, and into the bar they stroll.

Emptier than usual, with curfew tiptoeing round and round that minute hand and the soldiers waiting beyond to scare the revelry right out of the citizenship, but there's a couple in one corner and a few lads slouching over the bar with their eyes to the telly overhead, and the little blonde in the corner passing her swimming eyes over Kol and liking what she sees.

He gives her a right good fuck off with his eyes, and as one of the men on the far bar stools looks up and recognizes him, he flips the lid off his Starbucks and flicks the whole thing into his face, giving him a good dash of that hot brown piss right in the eyes while Kol bounces the man's companion off the edge of the bar.

The gal with her wandering eyes screams; Kol gives either man one to the chest with his Glock and on out the back they make themselves scarce as the noise of the left-behind takes up like a siren.

* * *

He kicks in the door.

Jack and Donovan facedown on the floor, the humans ricocheting about in chaos and the bounce all out of his bloody step now as he muscles his way through to the back door and shoulders it open to let the night air slap the smile right from his face.

"I will rip his  _heart_ out!" he screams, flinging the words in a circle as he spins, the night sky revolving round him and the alleyway blank in all directions, nothing but the rubbish fluttering away down the pavement. " _Do you hear me_ ,  _Kol_? I will lick his life from my fingers as you watch, brother!" he shrieks away into the sky, and he wipes the spittle from his lips and back into the bar he goes, for a bit of therapeutic decapitation, until the whole floor is ankle-deep with his rage.

* * *

He wakes in the deepest part of the night, with the silence all round him like a funeral shroud and the bed empty, but above this top-floor room there's the weight of a man creaking the shingles with each shift of his cheek, and so out onto the balcony he ducks, giving himself an easy boost onto the roof and scrambling his way up the slope of it to his friend.

Kol holds up the cigarette he is smoking and gives it a good squint of his eyes. "These are shit, mate. You used to have good taste in smokes. What's wrong with cigars?"

"I see you've gone and smoked half the packet anyway, you shit."

Kol smiles round his fag.

He pockets his hands. "Any particular reason you're up here, then?"

"Just savoring my recent victory over Nik."

"Would have liked to see the look on his face," he says, and eases himself down onto the shingles soundlessly as he can, stretching out one leg and keeping the other upright for the arm he drapes over it.

Kol flicks some of the ash from his fag over the roof.

"I know he's your brother," he says softly, even with the pain like a knife in him.

"But he's a pile of shit; I've heard."

He scratches the back of his neck.

Kol takes another drag and away into the moonless night it goes, up and up till the wind has banished the whole long line of it.

"I meant I know he's your brother, so no hard feelings. For you, of course. I hope his prick falls off and Caroline leaves him, actually," he says, and laughs his way through the tightness in his chest.

Kol shakes another bit of ash onto the shingles.

"Well, now, you're going to find your way back to him one day. Don't be letting him shit all over you, hear? That's what I'd like to see. That's all I'd like to see."

He sees Kol sneak a glance at him out of the corner of his eye.

He lets his other leg down and leans back on his hands, their knees touching, the cigarette puffing away toward its death.

"No, it's done," Kol says, and he flicks the cigarette over the side of the roof and they both watch it spiral down to sputter for long moments against the pavement till the flame's got nothing left to eat and starves itself cold.

"You wouldn't be up here if it was."

Kol sniffs and flicks an itch from the side of his nose with his thumb. "Doesn't mean I'm not going to angst over it a bit. But I was mad at you because you were right, Tim. We circle back to Nik over and over again, all of us, no matter what he does, and we never fail to expect it to turn out differently. But I think 900 years of that shit is long enough. And Nik won't get over this. You don't betray him and walk away. So we'll see it through to its end, Nik and I. And I've decided it's my turn to win."

"And how will you do that?" he asks quietly.

Kol rubs his nose again, looking out over the edge of the roof. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm still deciding how much of a lesson he needs to learn." He smiles thinly.

So they sit in the cloudless darkness with their knees touching and the tragedy of the whole immortal mess of them moving through him and weighting all the bits of him that ought to fly free, him without the dogging of the clock pursuing his heels into fleeting nights, till his friend tells him, "I never wanted to be free of Nik. But he didn't understand that," and with a great swallow he replies, "Well, is it only your brother's love that matters to you, then?" and lets that just swell and swell between them.

For a very long time the silence stretches out and out between them.

"But why would you?" Kol asks him thickly, and he wonders how long it's been brewing in the poor fecker, spat out nearly at the end of his mother's childbearing years and lost between the cracks, all of them just rolling and rolling over him because there you are, then, he's smiling, sure and he'd say something if any of the jabs had made it through to the soft parts.

A man's laughter may build an empire but never a bridge.

He hunches forward over his knees.

"Why don't you ask yourself why wouldn't I?" he asks, rubbing his chin.

"I do have a very large cock," Kol says, and then he starts to sob.

* * *

Oh, Jesus, Nik.

He doesn't even know how to say good-bye.

Tim gets up on his knees and puts his arms round him with a hushed, "All right; all right, then; shh" and he means no offense, but for just a moment he wishes it were Bekah with the hair like his mother's.

"Shh, then. Shh," Tim tells him gently, and rocks him till he's got nothing left.

* * *

She still thinks about him sometimes, the man in the alley, with all his tiny years spread out beneath him and her just clutching that gun, and staring down at him and feeling in herself nothing little girls with mothers to be proud of them should feel.

_God_ , the smell of him, the hot wet rush of his death, the prickling of her fangs and not horror, not  _horror_ , but the yearning hot and bottomless and everywhere.

And where does she  _put_ it.

Like.

A writer.

She comes home and she flails away at her keyboard, she puts everything she is, everything life has squeezed out of her into this keyboard and she keeps uprooting it all, she keeps pulling and pulling and  _pulling_ and maybe someone hears her between characters and maybe someone does not but it's  _there_ , she cut it out and she slapped it down still squirming and she will be forgiven, this weaver of stories with her fiction safely between reader and soul, but what about her?

What about  _her_?

Can she ask that?

"Are you  _listening_?" Rebekah snaps from across the table, and smacks the beignet out of her hand.

She jumps. " _Excuse_ you! I can't believe you just did that!"

Rebekah rolls her eyes. "Oh, please, Caroline. Like abusing a pastry is the worst thing I've ever done."

"You can't just go around knocking people's  _donuts_ out of their hands because they're not paying attention to you! You are such a bitch sometimes."

Rebekah leans back in her chair and flicks her eyes out over the street, watching a soldier stroll his way up the sidewalk past them, glaring at everything.

She crosses her legs beneath the table.

"Hello!" she snaps. "You could at least apologize! And maybe, you know, go buy me another beignet."

"I could, but I'm not going to do either of those things."

"Well it's not like I expected you to. That would be considerate. I just thought I'd make the suggestion."

"You don't make suggestions, you give orders. And I don't take orders from people like you." Rebekah flashes her loftiest of smiles and takes a sip from the chai tea in front of her. "Anyway, as I was saying, Nik was just absolutely  _unbearable_ the other day. Do you know he  _actually_ -"

"I don't really care to listen to you bitch about Klaus right now."

"Then what good are you?" Rebekah demands, crossing her arms.

"Ok, just so you know, this isn't how you do the friend thing. You don't sit there, fire off a bunch of rants at someone's head, and never reciprocate by actually listening to their problems too. It's not all supposed to be about you, ok? That's not how it works."

Rebekah blinks. "I don't understand."

She rolls her eyes. "Fine. Drink your tea. Bitch about Klaus to your heart's content. I'll do the other bad friend thing where I sit here and pretend like I'm actually listening."

"You were already doing that. Besides, we're not friends."

She lifts an eyebrow. "Ok, then, not-friend. But then who's going to braid your hair while you're busy flashing your withered black soul for all to see by keeping up a running commentary all the way through A Walk To Remember?"

"Well, I don't see why I was supposed to root for that frumpy little thing."

"Because she had  _cancer_."

Rebekah blinks again. "But her boyfriend had potato nose."

She jabs her finger into the space between them, lifting herself halfway off her chair with the vehemence of this, her voice scattering a group of children shoving one another in the street. "If you  _ever_ speak ill of Shane West again-"

"Relax, Caroline. It's not as if I don't already know you have horrid taste in men." Rebekah smiles sunnily, tipping up her chin to look down her nose.

She sits back with a shake of her head and makes a grab for Rebekah's tea that she is almost fast enough to land, and for a moment they wrestle for it, and there's a little smile out of them both as they slap away at one another's hands, and another as she sneaks a glance around for spectators and then blurs her fingers for the crumpled beignet in the middle of the table and launches a piece of it toward Rebekah's hair.

There's this nice sort of quiet between them, sometimes. To just kind of bask in someone's presence, to understand that they're soaking up yours as well, that sometimes words only have to be felt, that companionship should not be an obligation, that silences are not always to be filled-

She likes it.

She used to have it.

But that was a long time ago.

And sometimes she wonders-

Sometimes she wonders, did they lock these words away inside themselves to set an example, to keep all of it, God  _so_ much of it, pressed down inside her, to tell her with their little exasperated glances your problems are not welcome, for you there is no room?

"What do you have to talk about?" Rebekah asks after a long moment, not looking at her.

"What?"

"You said you're not supposed to fire off a bunch of rants at someone's head without reciprocating by listening to their problems as well."

She lowers her head and flashes her best Klaus smile, until Rebekah looks up at last to see it. "Are you making a friend pass at me?"

" _No_."

"I think you like me."

She gets the morning wood of all stony glares, it's that hard.

And then something dissolves in Rebekah's eyes and she looks down once more at the table, and her voice is a very small thing, for this most unbearable of all head bitches. "Don't you have something to tell me?"

She lets the tentative rain fill up the silence between them.

Your brother is here.

He loves you.

And it's such a big, big thing, all these years and deaths between you and still all of you clinging on with your fingernails, and getting in your jabs where they hurt most, in all the places you could have sworn no longer ached.

"Caroline?"

It's not her secret to tell, she knows.

But she overhears a lot.

Sometimes they forget her, tiptoeing along on the outskirts of them all.

So with Elijah patting Rebekah's back she sat in Klaus' empty office and she hugged her knees to her chest and she quietly wiped her cheeks because shh, shh, she knows.

She knows.

All the empty holes in you where there are supposed to be people. Elena to the left of her heart and Bonnie on the right and they were never going to be openings she had to stuff up or fall into.

She folds her hands on the table and looks down at them.

Rebekah stares at her.

The rain tap tap taps on the umbrella overhead.

"You could have trusted me not to tell Nik," Rebekah says, and the rain tap taps away and she plays with her fingers and she remembers how many times she was precisely here, looking in on a secret from where she has always been kept, on the fringes, and it's not her secret, it's not her  _secret_ , but she looks up and she licks her lips and she says, "Do you want to talk to him?"

And then they just sit there staring at one another, until Rebekah smiles, and it's like a stab, it goes all the way through, but she's lighter for it, if you can understand that.

* * *

So the next time that unidentified number flashes onto her screen she tears herself away from America's Next Top Model and she chucks the phone across her bed to Rebekah and she mutes the TV and she lifts herself onto her knees to bear the load of all this hope. "I think it's him," she whispers, and crosses her fingers.

And the bitch flashes her best privileged snot look and snaps, "Stop whispering you twit, he can't hear you", and thumbs the 'talk' button with such nonchalance it's so seriously obvious that everything comes down to this one moment, with the clock tick ticking on the wall and the pulse thump thumping in her wrists and outside the window all the length of the street drowned in fog.

"If this is Kol, speak now or forever lose your testicles."

* * *

He hangs up.

Tim looks up at him from the bed. "You going to go meet her?"

He gives the phone a little toss and pockets it with a flourish.

"Of course. You heard her. And when my sister makes a promise to keep your testicles in a jar for all eternity, she doesn't just wait round for you to call her bluff. Ask me sometime about the thirteenth century boyfriend who tried to rape her."

* * *

The fog slithers along after her as she walks among all the flotsam of humanity that inevitably begin to surface at this hour of the night, skulking about with their brutalities in their eyes, and their smiles to swallow such a little girl whole.

One of them has a knife.

She puts it through his eye and gives his head one good hard knock against the street light, and down he goes with his brains all about him, and his friend just screaming and screaming.

"Stop. You're shrill," she commands him, and he snaps his mouth shut hard enough to crack his teeth.

She smiles. "Please tell me you're actually wearing something clean," she says, and when he shakes his head with a spastic jerk, she sighs and she rolls her eyes skyward and she wonders why she hasn't eaten the whole lot of them, these stunted little things so far beneath her. "Did you wash your hair recently?"

He nods.

"I don't mean recently by poor people standards. Within the last six hours?"

He nods again.

"Do you have lice? Dandruff? Anything else you would expect from someone wearing Kmart hiking boots?"

He shakes his head.

She rips off his scalp, and wipes his friend distastefully from her hands.

Oh, what a nuisance he is, crying and shrieking and just carrying on about the whole thing as he feels about his skull for the little patches left behind, and then sending up a whole new wail when he brings his hands round to his face to watch the blood drip from his fingers, like the sight is anything novel for a man like him.

She doesn't put him out of his misery.

She wants her brother to hear her coming.

Men are to be managed, after all, and she knows all the little tricks.

He lounges so casually as he waits with his frightened heart to be loved.

She can hear him halfway down the block, his noisy pulse and his lungs busy at the cigar smoke he knows she hates and what she assumes must be the Irish twit, shifting around beside him.

She won't say it.

But if he could just hold her for a bit, so she knows it's not irretrievable.

Both boys come up off the wall where they have leaned themselves and hold themselves straight for her inspection, consciously or no, and she crosses her arms and passes her eyes over them both, lingering coldly on this stupid little interloper in his bloody hat, till he clears his throat and looks to Kol for help.

Her brother gives another draw on his cigar.

He blows the whole long stream of it into her face.

"Unless you want to eat your own penis, don't do that. Ever. Again."

He smiles that particularly menacing smile Nik has passed along down the years, and hands his cigar off to Tim, who takes a good drag on it and very carefully aims his exhale at his feet.

"Lovely to see you again, Bekah."

"Nik's going to kill you," she blurts out, and it's not at all what she meant to say, but she got only a peek of him when he stepped out from behind that veil, and here he is, here he  _is_ , Nik, with the bloody little dimple in his chin and the eyes like a bloody kicked dog's when you hurt him, and don't you remember what he looked like, peeping up from Mother's blanket, his hair still wet with his new existence, and that smile lit the own on your face as you went to a knee so she could bask in it too?

She lifts her chin and glances briefly at Tim. "And you. Whatever your name is."

"Don't be petty, Bekah, you know his name."

"I'm sure I've got it somewhere in the back of my mind. I just don't care."

Kol scratches at the back of his neck and leans back against the wall once more, angling a hip out, the ease just radiating off him, but she notices one of his hands steals to the boy's vest, to fiddle with the hem of it, and the glance between them in that language that is never to be understood by the likes of her, this dialect of lover and loved.

"Nik doesn't always get to win, Bekah."

"A thousand years says differently."

"You could help me."

"I'm not stupid," she snaps. "I've seen how your story ends. He'll kill your little boyfriend, dagger you, then in another four hundred years he might decide that maybe it's time to let you out, if he feels like it."

"Why don't you stop being his little lapdog for two seconds?"

And she knows then.

Nik is the only brother who needs her more.

You won't understand.

You will think it's about you, you will think there was imbued in these unbreakable three something you will never have.

And if she could fold you in her arms and she could stroke your hair and tell you of course not, she loves you fairly, it's not your lack but hers-

But she was never a mother.

She was never a mother.

But she'll watch you cut the cord and sail away just the same.

"If the two of you would just stop being so bloody-"

"Then the answer's 'no'?" he cuts in, shoving himself off the wall once more. "Show of hands?" he asks with that sharp brightness in his voice, and lifts his own. "Who saw that coming?"

"Kol."

"I think we're done here, Bekah. Please congratulate Caroline for having an even bigger mouth than me. That's quite impressive."

Tim stubs out his cigar and puts his hands awkwardly in his pockets, sneaking a glance up from underneath his cap.

" _Why don't you just come back_!" she screams at him. "That's what we wanted! That's bloody  _it_ , you little idiot!"

"It's  _not_!" he roars right back, putting himself right in her face. "It's not, Bekah. That was what  _I_ wanted. Nik wept his crocodile tears, and maybe he even fooled himself, maybe he thought it was real, his grief, but the only thing that bothered him was not having me under his boot anymore."

"But I don't care about Nik. It was real for me."

"Then don't go back to the house. Turn your back on  _him_ for once. I'll make sure he doesn't hurt you. And you can do whatever you want. You can live outside his boundaries. He won't dagger you. I wasn't there last time, but I won't let him do it now. I won't. And all you have to do is make the same promise."

He puts a hand on either of her shoulders, tentatively, and he's so tender about it, her little brother with all the inexplicable softness the years forgot to take.

He wants so badly for her to love him more.

He never covered that up.

But somewhere out there is Nik with Mother still a hole inside him, and her with the hair just the same shade, he likes to tell her sometimes as he splashes away at his canvas, and he never won't need her, do you see?

Petting his wounds not because he deserves it but because if her womb did not birth him, neither did it nurture any others?

She looks up at him, and out of the corner of her eye she can see her answer all over the Irish boy's face, and the way he stares at Kol with all the tenderness of an elder, but it hasn't yet hit him, there is yet hope in his eyes because she hasn't left, she hasn't  _left_ , it's more than he expected, surely just once, just  _once_ , she watches him think.

He's so natty in his coat with the collar drawn up round his neck, her little brother.

She fixes the lay of it for him.

And then she wipes her nose and she walks away.

* * *

"Don't worry about it, Tim," he says when Bekah's footsteps have long died off. "It was always Nik who made me cry."

But the boy kisses him anyway, just where the collar of his coat ends, on that little strip of skin between jaw and jacket, and leaves his face pressed there for a very long moment.

* * *

She goes for some reason back to the girl's hotel, and she doesn't feel herself crying, perhaps it's too familiar a sensation, after all this time, but when the door opens and Caroline's own face crumples and she tears up for all these pains that are not her own she knows her grief has not yet let up, and she lets the girl grab her almost crushingly, and press them together until all the tears are squeezed out of them both.

Mother, she thinks when the girl has force-fed her three mugs of tea and curled up to sleep against her back, with the sheet pulled up round them both.

Why does she still need you?

You will say it is a very small, long-ago thing, but a mother's legacy does not shrink with her bones.

She pulls Caroline's limp arm over her waist and cries herself away into dreams.

* * *

He makes the witches come to him now.

He is a Mikaelson after all.

He wired a short into the light, so it flickers every so often, and plunges his face into shadow, making of his handsomeness a sort of villain's mask, the one half boy, the other shade, and with the bat sprawled over his shoulder, he thinks it makes for quite a nice picture.

Nik would be proud.

"We tracked down Caroline Forbes," Marie Allain tells him nervously, and he cocks his head.

She conjures up some fiery I am woman hear me roar I fell civilizations with my red sinner's lips and my black strumpet heels bravado, for she straightens her shoulders and meets him eye to eye, and he might be impressed, darling, if there weren't that little tremor in the neck, with its tell-tale flinching of the tendons.

"She's the best source of information we have. We're sending some of the wolves to raid her hotel tomorrow night. If we could capture her, interrogate her, then slip her right back into Klaus' network, compelled to keep an eye open and to feed back to us anything she sees- we could figure out where best to strike to bring your bother down. She's one of his few weaknesses, and the easiest to exploit."

He rolls his thumb over the handle of his bat.

"So you want me to compel her to spy on Nik."

Tim is studiously avoiding this little display, hat down, nose in his book, but he sees the little side look the man's giving him as he pretends  _Moby Dick's_ got the interest up in him, but let's be honest, darling, it's nothing but a vague breeding ground for all that homoerotic Queequeg/Ishmael fan fiction you're spinning away underneath that hat, because for what other reason does any reader stay -a trice-visited pontification on the skeletal integrity of every whale known and unknown to man?

He thinks not.

He rolls his thumb over the grip once more. "That would certainly piss Nik off, wouldn't it?"

The light sputters.

He smiles.

* * *

She makes it out of her chair and all the way across the room in the time it takes some invasive jerkwad to kick in the door, and a blur of her hand to their throat and she focuses her eyes out of this narrow battle lust and pauses half an inch away from the neck of a smiling Kol Mikaelson.

"Good evening, darling," he says, and boots her door clean off the hinges as it swings lazily back into his face.

"What the  _hell_ are you doing?" she demands as he just makes himself right freaking at home, strolling in like she didn't rightfully compel herself this suite for free.

Tim slinks into the doorway and pauses there awkwardly with his hands in his pockets.

Kol half-turns to gesture back at him. "Look at him- standing politely in the doorway with his eyes down so you've the time to dress if you're currently indisposed, like a real gentlemen- isn't that adorable? And me just waltzing in with no care for any of that, breaking things as I go." He knocks a vase off the table beside her sofa. "Where are my manners?"

"I was just wondering that myself. Stop touching my  _stuff_."

"Don't worry about it- you're not coming back here anyway."

"What? And excuse you, but what if I  _had_ been naked?"

"I hate to disabuse you of the specialness of being my first, but I've seen a naked woman or two in my time, darling." He spins around, taking in the room as he revolves, his hands out to either side. "What do you want to take with you? Those books?" he asks, and from the table he scoops  _Guerilla Days In Ireland_ and the  _Handbook For Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army_  and this almost-pristine copy of H.P. Lovecraft stories she swiped from Klaus' bookshelf when he wasn't looking, because  _sue her_ , it was just gathering dust anyway, and he lobs them across the room to Tim, who has ventured a careful step beyond the doorway. "Tim, be a good straight white boy and carry her books."

"What is going on?"

"You're clearing out. You've got a welcoming committee coming soon."

" _What_?"

"The witches have caught you, they're sending werewolves round to collect you, so take anything you can't afford to lose, go back to the house for a little while, till it all settles down, then find yourself a different hotel." He holds up a pair of panties she left drying on the TV, gives the waistband a playful snap, and slingshots them at Tim.

She's kind of gratified to see how quickly he gets out of the way, like there is contained in this flimsy little black scrap all the holy hell and brimstone of God Himself, and he comes up so  _red_ , and for just a moment she wonders what it must have taken, to have come through all these years and kills with that sort of bashfulness intact, and then Kol claps his hands and orders them all over the balcony, and Tim sidesteps her panties like they bite and vanishes into the bedroom.

"Why aren't we going out the front door? Are they already here?" she asks, following them both out onto the balcony where Kol has already swung a leg over the railing and has paused to flick his tongue at Tim, who fakes a swing at Kol's head with her books.

"No; it's just more dramatic this way. You don't escape out the front door, darling," he says, and motions Tim forward with a finger. "You better come and give me a kiss, Tim. It might be our last." He cuts his eyes toward her and smiles mischievously as he flicks them back to Tim.

"Oh, shut up, you fecking-"

Kol props his elbows on his leg and folds his hands into a knot, resting his chin on them and looking up with that innocent air of the attentive student, his smile not easing. "I'm listening. What did you want to say?"

Tim clears his throat and looks at her.

"What am I missing?"

"He wants to call me a cunt, but he won't do it in front of you," Kol tells her, and then he lifts his head from his hands and yanks Tim in by the collar of his shirt for a kiss Tim has to bend almost double to receive, and over the side of the railing he goes, Tim after him in a moment, she sighing and shutting the door behind them all.

"Do  _not_  drop those books!" she yells down over the railing.

The boys look up at her.

Kol smiles and swats one of them from Tim's hand.

He catches it half an inch from the damp street and shoves Kol in front of an oncoming car he dodges with a laugh.

"Oh my  _God_. If there were a button labeled 'absolutely do not push end of the world as we all know it your face will literally melt off like those Nazis in Indiana Jones' you would push it. Twice."

"Three times," Kol replies, throwing an arm around Tim's neck. "Just to make sure."

Somehow she herds them onto the sidewalk into something that might be called a line if you tip your head to one side and maybe squint your eyes really hard and you 're blind and one head injury shy of those homes that Jeremy used to call Raisin Farms, and maybe it annoys her just a  _teensy_ bit, ok, to be jostled about by their antics until she has to fall back just a little, to walk on alone with her unruffled clothes and her neatly-ordered hair, but they're happy.

So she walks along behind them through the lamplight and the fog, and she smiles.

Kol leads them a good half a block with Tim's head under his arm, snatching his hat away to ruffle his hair as he walks him in this headlock toward the empty intersection ahead, Tim getting in a few good hits to his ribs, until he is let up and a shoving match breaks out, and her watching those books with little helpless snaps of her hands into the wet night as Tim careens into a wall and they tilt tilt tilt tilt-

She sees both of their heads jerk around a split second before she hears the breathing and the footsteps and along on this wave of sound the scent of the nerves at their throats and their scalp lines, the fog giving rise to these little far-off patches which do not quite blend, and the boys parting now to prepare for their moment, as boys always do.

Kol cracks his neck.

Tim takes out his revolver and spins the chamber.

And then out of the fog four more people who will never go home, Tim lifting his arm to shoot the first between the eyes and Kol ducking casually under this arm to clothesline the second onto his back, the third fumbling his gun out into the night just in time for Kol to rip off his hand at the wrist, and she doesn't want to tell you what his screams do to her, the way they twist and twist inside her in all the wrong ways, and the hot spray of this stump across Tim's cheek and the way Kol licks this off so  _casually_ , and she doesn't vomit.

She doesn't vomit at all.

Tim shoots the fourth.

"Caroline," the boys call out in unison, half a second before she smells the gun and she hears the heave of his nervous young stomach fresh to war, and she spins to slap the pistol out of his hand and back him by the collar of his shirt into the wall of the nearest building.

"Rip out his heart and catch up with us, darling," Kol tells her, and continues on just as nonchalantly as any human out for his midnight stroll in the mist of this gray evening.

"Please," the kid whispers, and this close she smells the bile on his breath, and the detergent on his shirt, and all the myriad little scents he has picked up as he has wandered through this life she is about to end, bar smoke and pumpkin latte and the fragile white snowfall of his last beignet, and everything in her yearning,  _yearning_ , so far past her compassion, and oh, Mom.

_Mom_.

Everything you never wanted for your little girl.

"Give him a pop to the back of the head, if it's too hard the other way," Tim says quietly from behind her, and she half-turns with the kid's shirt still in her hand, to see that he never did wander off with Kol, that he's holding out his revolver handle-first, her books still tucked under his arm, his eyes soft with his understanding.

She stares at him.

The boy is breathing louder than them both.

She listens to his life rattling away in his chest.

The fog touches her shoulders and settles over her and if she were a girl, if she were just a girl, she would feel the chill of this in her bones and in the fingers strangled to frostbite in the collar of this boy who breathes, who breathes again, who wants her to let him go, please God, please  _God_ , he says, he didn't know.

He didn't know.

She woke in a hospital with her aching gums and her lungs still stirring from that primordial sleep of the recently-dead, who are not supposed to shake off the cobwebs of this long black forever and watch the little girls in their mirrors smear blood from their teeth, and she didn't know either.

Here's how it is.

She tells Tim no, she's got this, and she shoves her hand into the boy's chest up to her elbow.

* * *

Caroline walks through his front door with three books under her arm and the mist still in her hair, and what he wants most of all is to not be struck by this.

But she sits him up a little straighter in his chair anyway.

He swirls the whiskey in his glass and sips it with barely a look in her direction, letting his knees loll a little wider, his head sagging back against the rest, his lashes coming down to shutter his eyes, to view her as she should be examined, with this lazy half-gaze of the unattached, and now she pauses in the doorway of this study he has commandeered while Elijah is off who the bloody hell knows where, the fire spitting behind its grate and the books with their silent years pressed flat between the pages, looking on as nothing else ever will, with cold flat insouciance.

Perhaps he'll build an entire house out of the things.

"Hi," she says, a bit tentatively, rolling her bottom lip between her teeth, and he takes another drink.

He lets the silence stretch until she is tense with it.

"What are you doing here?" he asks at last, directing his attention precisely where she deserves it, everywhere but her.

"My hotel got raided by some werewolves, so I headed over here. I thought I could stay the night, keep off the streets until things had kind of settled, then go move my things to one of the other safe houses. The Hilton on St. Charles is a bust now. So. Don't…send anyone else there."

She keeps between them this careful distance he worked so hard to make her cross.

He swishes the whiskey in his glass. "Bekah's not here."

She sets down her books on one of the end tables and behind her back go her hands, and now this little careful side step with her head down and her lashes coyly going, and the smile she knows cracks the rust from his heart. "Well, there's probably someone else here that I could hang out with for a while."

He runs a hand over his stubble and looks down.

"Klaus," she says, and he listens to the slight stick of this in her throat, and he does not look up.

"Well, you've just missed Stefan. He was round here half an hour or so ago, looking for you. I'm sure you can catch up with him."

"So…you don't want me to stay?"

"Not particularly, sweetheart."

And because his reputation has long since murdered his heart, he cannot tell you to what he is reduced, watching this stick itself in every part of you some bloody fools saw not fit to love.

"Ok," she says quietly. "But  _why_?"

And his legs with their new independence lift him from his chair and his feet carry him onward and he doesn't so much hold her as fall on her, a creature of his breadth, can you imagine, and the girl bearing him gamely, as she bears all things, and his brother, Caroline, his  _brother_ out there come round at last to his hate-

She kisses the side of his head, and he can't be mistaken, the tenderness in it, he has witnessed it far more than he has partaken in it, but it's genuine, of course it is, of course her hand smoothes his cheek because she is similarly overcome, and the breath he kisses out of her- it comes up short because what lungs can process a moment like this, what heart would stall out of pity, Caroline, is he not right?

Isn't he?

She holds his cheeks in both hands, and away across them go her thumbs, and her smile just lighting bloody everything.

He kisses her with his hand round the back of her neck, not crushing but lightly as he has ever held anything, just cradling it, and willing her back to him as his brother will not be wooed, with every cold and powered ounce of him squeezed dry by the years but somehow still breathing, still breathing, Caroline.

He has always let his hatred win.

And then she waltzes-

She waltzes in here with her bloody smile and she thwarts him at every turn, and he holds her neck in his hand and he can't even squeeze.

If man's soul is one great theatre of war for however many years he sucks in all the world and he lets it back out, to the one side the charge of the conscience, to the other the swords of the beast that makes for himself a home in the pits of the kindliest men, he has long since grown tired of this struggle and to the only victor pitched his lot.

But she twists the knife in his back, little Caroline with her secret rendezvous and her false declarations, and she smiles like she can't help it, flush against him as she is, and he can only shut his eyes, and breathe against her neck, and down his back one of her hands trails, until he is shuddery with it, and his arms not tightening to snap her, but to keep her.

* * *

He doesn't say anything.

He lowers her to the floor and he pulls off her jeans carefully, one leg at a time, and he trails his lips all the way from her ankle to her thigh like he is not so much kissing as deifying her, but he doesn't say anything.

She strokes the curls at the nape of his neck and when he slips into her she lifts his head by them and kisses him with her thumbs pressed into his cheekbones, not opening her mouth but just breathing into his, his hands sliding up into her hair and along her cheeks and then feeling along her sides and around her back and pulling them chest to chest until they are so close he can only slide each of his slow thrusts a short inch at a time into her, his eyes shut.

She skims her fingers along his lower back and ghosts them over his hips and up his spine, now, raising the skin there in little bumps as she explores all the way up to his shoulders and the slight anomaly of his tattoo, stroking the edges of it, his breath going thin in his throat as he props himself on his hands and hovers over her now, just looking, and everything in his eyes exactly how she always wanted to be loved.

He comes with a ragged exhale against her throat, turns his head to rest his cheek on her shoulder, his nose pressed against her neck, and now he slides his hand down between them, still inside her, his orgasm trickling down her thigh, his breath still with that sharp edge of exertion, and he runs his thumb over her clit, not moving his hips, just circling a finger over and over her, pressing down and working his fingers back and forth until she is shaking with the sensation, her legs trembling around his waist, her toes curling, that jittery wet heat just building and building, her hand coming up to clutch the back of his head, her calves working themselves a little higher up his back, her heart hammering, her throat tight, all the breath in her lungs just squeezing and squeezing itself up this narrow space to slide out roughly between her lips, almost a cry, and Klaus suddenly lifting himself from the crook of her neck to kiss the breath right back down inside her, until she is wheezing with it, both their mouths frantic, his hips suddenly joining the fray to push her back and back and back into the carpet-

"Caroline," he says breathlessly, his voice strained or breaking or both, and he gets a hand under her thigh and pulls her leg up his back until he hits a whole new angle, and she cries out with the first small ripple, muffles it against his lips, drops her head back to pant her way through the rest, coming and coming again as he frames her face with his rough hands and feels carefully along her cheeks with his thumbs, giving her the final few thrusts she needs to bring her all the way through, his necklaces jingling.

He props himself on his elbows when she has gone still and boneless beneath him at last, sending his shaking fingers up over her forehead and back into her hair, and she smiles at him, and he wants it to not mean anything, she knows.

It hurts so badly, when they don't carry through.

How many times how many boys how many  _friends_ have made her this one unspoken promise, and she pitching herself headfirst into their attention that never lasts and breaking something new when she reaches the bottom?

But he smiles back.

And she's not like the others.

She's not like the others.

No take backs Forbes.

That's always been her problem, you see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: One more part to go, and then we're done with this fic, and it's on to the eleventh in the series. Caroline has big things coming up in the next part, we'll see more of how Tyler's presence in New Orleans affects her, and we'll finally get that flashback, which will feature Rebekah and Kol. Also, more Team Barbie. And, as you've probably guessed, Kol and Klaus are heading for an ugly showdown.
> 
> The book Kol is reading from, in which a woman carries around a rag full of dried splooge that she regularly sniffs and fondles to keep herself grounded when love attempts to carry her away, is indeed real. A Faerie Fated Forever by Mary Anne Graham, possibly the most bizarre book you'll ever read. The 'hot larva' (no, that's not a typo I made) gushing out of some woman's 'hot cave' is also a reference from an actual book, although unfortunately enough I can remember neither the quote nor the book itself.
> 
> Teleny is indeed a very gay, very explicit 19th century porn attributed to Oscar Wilde, although many suspect it was actually written in round Robin style and passed around a group of his friends and colleagues, and that he either had little or nothing to do with it. I have the complete collection of his works, and having never heard of this novella before, I eagerly jumped right into it, having no idea what it was about.
> 
> Imagine my surprise. "Well, hey, that homo-erotic subtext seems a little less...subtexty than usual.' (A warning, if curiosity compels you to seek out this book. There's a pretty graphic rape scene in it, and at one point, A MAN IS ASS FUCKED WITH A BOTTLE AND THE WHOLE TIME I SAT THERE READING THIS I'M LIKE INTERNALLY SCREAMING BECAUSE NO BRO YOU DON'T PUT GLASS IN YOUR ASSHOLE NOTHING GOOD CAN COME FROM THAT AND GUESS WHAT NOTHING GOOD CAME FROM THAT.)
> 
> Thank you for reading, you glorious motherfuckers, and till next time.


	3. Part Three

Slow roll of the harbor water.

Rhythm like a snare drum on it, the loud slap and the long hiss of the return and all the city holding its breath in between.

And oh, the thickness of it, this city, like to drown you in this languid Louisiana bog.

Hold your breath and ease the shades on the peepers and feel all the long ghosts of this graveyard city with the voodoo like a tickle along your back and the heavy breath of her spooks spider-walking the neck.

Oh, he takes the piss out of his friend for his thespian flash.

Never met a door could be opened by his hand rather than his boot.

But he's a strut on him might be in step with the rhythm of that harbor water and his hands in his pockets just casual as you please, and the fag in his mouth adding its long white nonchalance to the midnight, and alongside him his friend toting that Christ bleedin' bat over one shoulder.

And the head meant for its home run blow panting away into the night as below it the rubber legs stagger along past the boats in their slips.

He takes another draw and passes his fag to Kol.

Sniff of the boat diesel and the marine buggers drifting belly-first to their mortalities, and the poor man just foul with his nerves- smell him a mile away, bleeding his salt and ammonia fear.

Back to his mouth goes the fag and a pull on the end and he sends his breath skyward.

Kol cracks his neck.

He passes the fag once more.

And the man rattling his way through any manner of noisy obstacles, and the moon dogging his heels with her thin black spy.

Tastes his friend's lips on the end of the fag, gives it one more good go, till he's got the bastarding thing down to its filter, and then away beneath his boot he flicks it, not smudging it as would the good lad Timothy with his reverence for all God's fine and shining world, but leaving it to burn or not burn, flickering in the street.

He slips his hands back into his pockets.

"Marco!" Kol calls to the man ahead of them, and for just his ears he says, "I just love this game," and then he twirls the slugger and up onto the tip of his finger he pops it, to balance it with a busker's proficiency, and a one-hundred-eighty-degree turn with him and the bat holding steady all the time, throwing long moons-shadows over the water.

He transfers it to his nose. "No hands, Timothy," he says, and walks along with his head back and the bat shifting, shifting, but never pitching itself too far one way or the other, and the fucker just overwhelmed with himself, smiling as the whole lot of them wobble along.

"You're an eejit," he says fondly, and one good blow to the back of Kol's head knocks his little parlor trick from the air.

Exertion's worn the man down to a nub and put him on his hands and knees, scrambling for cover between the crates of a nearby warehouse, just fecking dashing the things about, whole avalanches of them clattering and flying about and trapping the foot that has to abandon its boot to the fates, and now him settled at last, burrowed away behind the stack to the right and clamping his mouth round the panic rattles.

They slide to an easy halt just outside.

"Do we have to come in and get you, or are you coming out, darling?"

Moon nearly full behind her few modest scraps of cloud, the little blushing bitch.

No prize for the almost, though, lad, so come on and make it quick, like.

They listen to the man wrestle his breathing under control, to the sweaty slide of his hand on his gun, and oh the prayers from the lips of the fucked.

Break your poor heart, they would.

"You know it's always worse when we have to come and get you, darling."

The man flicks off the safety of his pistol and takes a few moments to steel himself, got to put the rock back into your hand, knows all about that, he does, with the war in him wide enough to fill God's void.

Kol spreads his arms out to either side, the bat nearly taking his fucking head off.

"You be careful with that, you fucker. Going to break something important on me."

"No; I aimed it too high."

They wait for the man to reach his breaking point, to inflate himself with those balls-to-the-walls boyos brandishing their one-liners before their rifles, and the thousand-yard-stares of them just chilling till the director's cry drops them all like puppets and it's only little Tommy in his platform heels and his costumes and props leather.

So the breaths pass, and pass, his finger still frozen on that guard oh, miles and miles from the trigger will bring everything to its conclusion, one way or another.

"Tim's not getting any younger, you know."

He gives his friend a pop with his elbow. "Wouldn't know it from last night, would you?"

"You really wouldn't, darling."

The man takes another breath.

Sounds like the wind-up; everyone get a good grip on the shorts, then.

He comes up blazing.

But the rush of the finger along the guard and down over the trigger and the brief suspension of everything in that chest, one long pause for the sights to focus and steady themselves out of their double-vision and do you think not a one of them saw it coming, then?

Kol drives a screamer down the third base-line, just swinging for the win, he does, the man's hand and his gun winging away into this Louisiana smog, and not a second for him to contemplate the arterial spurt of his fresh handicap before he gets both hands in the man's collar and brings his forehead down onto the bridge of his nose, hard enough to crack them both.

The man crumples.

He straightens to rub his forehead, nudging the brim of his cap up out of the way to get in a good swipe with his arm, Kol watching with a laugh that crinkles his nose, the obnoxious fucker. "What's the matter?"

"Do you go around head butting people often? It fuckin' hurts!"

Kol twirls his bat, tilting his head as he looks down at the man in his red heap. "Don't worry. I'll kiss better anything you're having problems with." He looks up with a sly smile. "Not your forehead, then, I'm guessing?"

"No, I think that part of me's doin' just fine, then." He lifts an eyebrow.

Kol runs his tongue contemplatively over his bottom lip.

They land their kicks simultaneously, a boot for either temple, and the man not succumbing but taking both with a sharp cry, and convulsing with the force of them, and huddling himself into that instinctive coil of the womb now, crying for his God.

Kol brings the bat down on his shoulder.

He stomps the cheek pointed up toward the moon.

Splash of blood and the whole mess of the poor fellow sunny side up on the pavement, and his fangs just fuckin' wild for it.

He boots a hole clean through the ribs, to watch the failing lungs give one last moist pink go of it, frantic with their final death thrash.

A home run to his face and they'll be needin' the dental records for this one, lads.

* * *

He breaks away from Tim's lips just long enough to fumble open their hotel room, the man they picked up a few blocks back unsnapping his coat one-handed and nudging the door shut after them, the breath already up in his throat.

Easy things, men.

Give them a suggestion and along they trail at the end of their leash, tongue lolling, and never mind the collar throttling out their freedom.

He fists his hands in Tim's hair and yanks him down to put them nose to nose, giving him a good long tonguing, a bit messy, sloppy as they are with hormones, Tim already scrabbling away at the button on his trousers and giving up after a moment of brutal neck sucking distracts him from his task, and just sliding his hand down between them, to grip his cock through his jeans.

They kiss for another long few seconds till at last he breaks away once more to hurry himself out of his coat, and in this brief interim their guest sneaks in to have a go at Tim's lips, and he darts out a hand to seize him by the hair, jerking him back before he can land so much as a peck.

"Ah, ah, ah. You don't kiss him, darling."

The man blinks. "Then what the fuck, man? What am I here for?"

He walks him all the way to the chair in the corner, still with that grip on his hair, and flings him roughly into it, responding with that sly smile Nik has so polished in him to the man's affronted look.

"You're going to watch," he says, and circles round behind Tim, to see the whole spectrum of this on the man's face.

He drags a long kiss up Tim's neck, all the way to the underside of his jaw, and unbuttons his trousers. "You're going to watch, darling, and then we're going to eat you."

The man blinks again. "What?"

"What?" he parrots innocently, lifting an eyebrow as he slides his hand down to give Tim's cock a jerk that slumps the boy back against him, eyes half-shut.

* * *

So his life goes on.

But you knew that.

Thursday they eat two soldiers who have not yet learned it is not solely upon women the dark mouths of alleyways prey, and Friday a rather uppity young envoy of the witches is returned in three separate pieces, and between these all there is Tim, and no small amount of torn bedding and broken tables, everything harsh breaths and warm skin and the callused tenderness of the boy's hand on some part of him needs the touch more than he'll ever tell, till they've strained the last limits of their lust and Tim has dropped off to sleep in that helpless sprawl of the child, with his legs all knotted up in the sheets and his hands slid up under his pillow.

And him cradling the boy in his lap, where he has carefully snuck him after he's listened to the heart wind slowly down and down toward sleep, and settle into its deepest pits.

He follows the moonlight gingerly down one smooth cheek with his finger, smiling at the slight prickle of a hair here and there, and the boy indignantly telling him sure and he's a fuckin' beard if he wants it, went round storing his soup in it for a whole year in 1923, festering fucker.

You can love so much more safely, here in these soft hours bruised with that apathetic midnight doesn't care if you've your whole heart in your eyes.

He touches the hair at the nape of Tim's neck, lets the little kick of it flow through his fingers, and no stir but the slow sometimes of the air through his nostrils, and the twitch of one limb or another in its dream throes.

He wants to know:

What if he doesn't win?

He wants to know:

What if he does?

For where is the prize won a man who, released from his bars and his communal jumpsuit walks into empty white sunlight and no bosom for his cheek or arms for his shoulders and all of him heavy as always, with the prison sentence hung on him like a chain to be dragged?

Retribution is quite ashy, when the anger's burned it all off in your mouth.

And do you know-

What he wanted-

Just happiness, for one and them all.

It's too simple a motivation, for a man who understands how fickle is morality and how short a friendship promised for always and all the ways you can love, and love, and yet be entitled to none of it in return, and receive it all the less for what you give, but he did, and for his sister most of all, he yearned for it.

Going round the years stirring up every creature and no rock unturned, for want of it.

Sometimes it's worse not to cry, he's found.

When it blocks up inside you, and makes a hole where creep all the dead things you've gathered up over the years, and made of you a reflection, life and all her sensations bouncing off but never getting in.

But is he to pull the stopper on it, Tim?

When behind it is Bekah choosing neither him nor herself?

He strokes the boy's hair, and gathers him up in his arms, and oh never mention how clumsy he is at it, trying to rock them both into peace, and Tim sleeping through it all, but safe at least, and content enough, and maybe his touch for once the source of this.

* * *

She walks the streets long after they have gone to sleep, the shades drawn down over the eyes of the houses and the humans tossing beyond and the creatures just rousing outside, but she isn't looking for her brother.

She isn't.

It might seem like it.

Like she's going about with his final wounding stuck in her own heart, and chafing and chafing as if she's any scrap of a conscience left.

And her just wanting to go  _back_ , Kol, and maybe touch your cheek like a mother, and tuck you in against her chest, where she ought to have sheltered you from that Gilbert brat and his twig.

* * *

**London, 1888**

The fog slinks along like a beast in her wake.

She likes to think of it as a herald.

The lamps squirming to be free of it, flailing about with their long green fingers, and making ghosts of the shadows that grow their stories as do all children's tales, on fertile soil of peripheral glance, shrouded moon, and the fog in mute triumph over all, creeping, creeping.

She watches the woman turn round to cast her inferior eyes over the street, to try and pierce this miasma, and she stands, and she smiles, letting the fog build round her.

The woman's shoes begin their muted tapping once more.

Oh, run if it suits you.

Women are always doing that anyway, aren't they?

Forever fleeing while man strolls his kingdom comfortably.

She checks her hands as she walks.

Once she saw a sun spot.

It was quite upsetting, that one brown blemish among such pure white perfection, hands of a lily, she's got, or maybe pearls, or a bit of satin- anyway, something expensive, something faultless, something any man ought to sacrifice the whole Midas pile of his kingdom for, just to gaze, and gaze.

And she let him mark her.

She let him mark her with his nails and his teeth and any manner of other things he chose, and tumbled round beneath those bedcovers scoring her own brands and not loving him, but letting herself slip from time to time into tenderness, with her brother somewhere far off in this great wide world.

And yet he tastes of her, and then down he descends, to roll round in the soot.

She licks her last snack from her lips.

It's nothing personal, of course.

She's sure you're a lovely girl.

For a bottom-dwelling peddler who slithers out of her shanty each day looking neither pretty nor rich, of course, but we can't all suffer God's gifts, can we?

Anyway.

He's next.

She only wants him to see it coming.

She smiles and touches her hair.

And the fog boils and the woman turns back once more, and somewhere off in the distance some poor beast clip-clops his weary existence through the East End stink, and so casually she strolls.

Nik could learn a thing or two from her, about not overdoing it.

But he's a tit, and she shan't speak of him.

One of the lamps gives a sputter, the flame leaning, leaning, the leap of it sending out long thin tongues for a taste of the fog, and finding it lacking, drawing back, drawing back, the hooves clip-clopping on and the woman with that spider's tread of premonition still down her neck, the night feeling round for the edge of her own collar, and trying to insert itself with a wet thrust of its clumsy groping.

She pops the collar of her coat.

She lets the walking stick down from the crook of her arm to tap it against the cobblestones.

Yes, go on and look back.

Pick up your pace a bit, you feel the tingle of her all throughout you, the breath has come short to your lips, the fog has got a stranglehold on your reason, from the shadows spring those corner street headlines-

The woman picks up her pace.

She taps the cane and she touches her hair and she listens to the horse fade away.

The fog builds a wall between them.

One white layer at a time, and the stacks adding their cinders to the damp, for the poor to cough up later.

The woman takes a breath and quickens her step, and a surge of her heart and a glance to the shadows and she picks her skirts from the mud and she begins to run.

Humans.

They do just let their little minds run away with the shadows.

She puts herself before the woman in an instant, and smashes the scream right back down into her throat, opening a gash along the side of her neck with the cane, and oops, her mistake, she's nicked the artery.

Well that's less fun.

She kneels at the woman's side, running one contemplative finger over the abdomen soft with vice and half-realized children, and where oh where to put that first cut for the morning edition?

There is a soft noise just ahead of her, and a casual flick of a glance toward what will become her next victim, and she finds them already leaning against the street lamp only five feet away, arms crossed.

And so grown up, in his greatcoat and his epaulets, his beard thick as a man's.

And because this takes her by the throat, because it lifts her from her crouch, because her fingers yearn toward all the strange textures of him, the drape of his coat over shoulders that can't have possibly been so broad when last she left him, and the wiry beard down to his neck, and the hair let down shaggily over his forehead, unshorn with war, she lifts her chin haughtily, and she snaps, "What the hell is that on your face?"

He lights up to rival the lamp under which he stands.

"For a moment I thought there was some man wandering round London with my sister's face. But no one else is that much of a bitch."

She tries to break his kneecap with her cane, and he flits back just out of its reach, the positive  _ape_.

"I like your coat. Can I have it?"

" _No_ ," she barks. "I rightfully murdered someone for it; get your own."

"That's not a very nice tone. I'm a decorated veteran of the Russian Imperial Army, I'll have you know, Bekah."

"Because winter starved them of their best pack mules, and so they had to settle for you, because oh, with a face like that, he's close enough anyway, men?"

He doesn't lose his smile.

"Stop looking at me."

"I haven't seen you in fifty years, darling. A man dying of thirst will drink from even the most noxious of poisons, just for a cool trickle down his throat."

"Well, that's very poetic. Did you finally manage to learn what those little squiggles in the books are trying to tell you, and pinch it from somewhere?" She cocks a hip out to one side and crosses her arms.

"Which boyfriend did this one try and steal, darling?" he asks, nodding his head to the woman at her feet.

"Shut your face if you want to keep it," she snaps.

"Ah, I've hit a nerve," he says, and with his hands behind his back and his lips still smiling away beneath that scraggly rat's home he has the nerve to call hair, he circles her in ever-tightening loops, till she presses the tip of her cane into his chest to keep him just outside arms reach.

He leans just slightly into it.

"Maybe you can grant me a reprieve, if I tell you I didn't bring Nik with me?" he asks, and the smile's shortened but gone genuine beneath his beard, and his little eyes echoing it, and no different from the ones peeked up out of his birthing blanket to snatch away all the parts of her she should have saved for her children.

She tilts her chin a little higher, and into his sternum the cane digs, and digs, till he must be aching with it, and then she pops it abruptly down to bury it in this abysmal muck of the working class, and she holds out her arm.

"Fine. I've got one more tonight; I suppose you can come."

* * *

Catherine Eddowes is felled with another slash of her cane that opens the woman from ear to ear, and Kol makes a game of it, so that she does not remember this is only one more scene-filler in her long and tiresome story of these men who give so much less than they receive.

What a little boy he is, balancing the woman's kidney on his head, and wobbling back and forth through the night with his arms out to either side, and calling for her to watch.

She roots about for the woman's uterus and slices it out with her knife.

Women are so fragile, aren't they? Gutted like common pigs, the homes of their children cut loose like they are any other organ with none so tender a purpose.

Once there was such a home in her, and not spun of dust and time's musty spider thread but blood such as you'd never seen, lying here with your throat making a little puddle already cooling in the street, and the rest crawling about sluggishly with no heart to hurry its journey.

Perhaps she'll have it stuffed, a prize like this.

* * *

In the mansion she compelled out of some upper class fop who in his supernatural fog has wandered who cares where she slips off her jacket and she rolls up her sleeves, and to the wash stand with her brother and that horrid thing on his face.

"Sit down," she barks, shoving him roughly onto the little stool from her vanity table.

He is amused by her fussing, as he is by all things in this world, her little brother with his toys just wandering the streets.

"Don't tell me Nik and Elijah have one as well," she says, splashing water from the bowl onto his face, and laying out the cake of soap and razor and tilting her head to contemplate where she shall first land her assault.

"Nik does. Elijah doesn't."

She rolls her eyes, and dips the soap.

"I've told him over and over again he doesn't suit it," she snaps, working up a good foam between her hands.

Kol tips his head back to meet her eyes. "Well, you know Nik. No opinion with any weight but his own. And he thinks he looks dashing."

"You'll move your head when I say you will," she tells him, and roughly pushes it back down, setting aside the soap to rub her hands briskly over his face, down the jaw line and up round beneath his nose, giving him a good layer over the entire bristly abomination. "Nik always thinks he looks dashing. He's wrong."

"And that's why he has me- to continuously take him down a peg or two when he wakes each day and sets eyes on the fairest face in all the land, and realizes it's not his."

"Well, if it's such a gift to the world, why are you covering it up with vermin nesting materials? This is hideous. It doesn't even feel like real hair."

"It's a beard, Bekah; it's not supposed to feel the same as your pampered horse's mane."

"If you ever refer to my hair as a 'horse's mane' again, I'll slit your testicles, put a hot coal in each, and sew them shut once more." She tilts his head back to get at the hair under his chin, flicks the razor in one long stroke to the underside of his jaw, muddies the water with a long swirl of the lathered razor, gives him another good dash of the blade.

"I missed your genitally specific threats, Bekah."

"Of course you did. You enjoy being kept in line. That's why you've always been my favorite."

She runs the blade up his throat, treading delicately round the knot of his Adam's apple. "Of course, you're horrid about the actual staying in line part, but you like the bossing round that gets you there, at least."

"I like how red your face turns. It's very fetching."

She smiles just a little, and taps the razor against the side of the bowl, to loosen the hairs, to float free the lather in one long whitecap.

He tips his head to accommodate the next stroke of her razor, and for a moment there is only the scratching of this slow grooming, and the soft hush of his breath through his nostrils, and all the noisy inner workings of him, the heart which for five long decades she has set neither cheek nor ear to and the blood in his breast, and the lungs at their noisy labor of this faux life all alight in the fresh cheeks she begins to reveal one concentrated stroke at a time.

"How did you find me?" she asks quietly, and for a long moment he doesn't reply, just sitting quietly through these ministrations, his hands folded neatly in his lap, his head tipping this way and that.

"You know Nik has these little networks all over the world. A minion for every country. Anyway, he got wind you might be here and sent a couple of them on ahead to check up on things and report back to him. He and Elijah are both still in Russia."

She stops.

He looks up at her with those eyes she remembers so very well from his earliest days, the little dimple in his chin just beginning to show through once more, all the pink youth of him gleaming up at her, and his bloody heart in his eyes like it doesn't prick her own, and leave it slowly wasting within her chest. "I rounded them both up and sent them back to Nik to let him know not a hair on your head sighted anywhere near London."

She's such a girl sometimes.

Tearing up over a little kindness like that.

She blinks very rapidly and takes the razor to his chin once more.

"He talks about you all the time, Bekah. But you should go back to him when you're ready, not when Nik's ready," he tells her quietly.

Hasn't he seen in all the dusty devolution of history that girls are not to be chased, to be given their own minds, to be told here is choice, woman, and it springs from one's own breast?

She sniffs and wipes her nose.

"You're a little shit," she says, and he tips his head back and kisses the underside of her chin, and you wouldn't know, watching him skip his way from one bloodstained year to the next, that he could be so gentle about anything.

She lets the smile on her face ease into a little laugh, and brushes her hand down the unshaven side of him, half boy/half man, the stupid git, splashing the grown-up all about him, as though he's rhyme or reason to join these fatal ranks of the mature.

He opens his mouth.

She gives a good jerk with the razor across his carotid artery.

"Ouch, Bekah!"

"You were going to ruin it," she says coolly, dabbing at the blade with a finger and tasting the droplets of him on the very tip of her nail. "Good Lord, Kol, what have you been eating?"

"Russian peasant. And now it's in you, darling! No take-backs. I expect we should see you sprouting an apron at any moment, and dumping out the chamber pot yourself."

"Only if I've chopped you up and stuffed you in it, you idiot," she snaps. "Now turn your head," she orders, and jerks it into position herself, so hard she nearly snaps his neck.

* * *

It's positively Nik of her, but she watches him sleep.

Are we destined to love only those who make it seem worth our while? Have the storybooks so warped our hearts that love is always something which must be striven for, and not hardly attained when it is wrenched away once more, and whole mountains and Atlantics placed between soul and soul?

And boys like these, without conditions, who offer it up and orbit round in hope of its return get nothing for their simplicity, because there are no obstacles on their straight and narrow paths?

Nik's love is something to be navigated.

She knows that.

She knows it's to be steered round and gentled through.

And the youngest menace of them all throwing it out haphazardly, and dividing his heart up fairly between them all, to be torn to bits by man's most basic truth, that he needs nothing he is freely and happily given.

With his cheeks bare in the moonlight, and sleep come to take away his years, he is perhaps fifteen at most, and so small in his sheets, all 5' 11" of him, with the ghost of Henrik in his sleeping mouth, and the fair tips of his eyelashes.

In 1838 Paris he came to her just exactly like this, to send her on her way before the brother she cannot quite bear to face, and she'd like to think that inside he is driven by the same ugly mishmash of all the small and human motives to which she has year by year fed her girlhood, that he waltzed up to her casual as you please, only ten short minutes ahead of Nik because he sought her favoritism, because he thought for one moment gratefulness might beget love, and for once nudge him in this long and weary line-up ahead of his brothers, and perhaps this was no small matter on his mind, weighting the scale against Nik's wrath, but most of all, most of all, he thought of her and all the long and barren decades with the happiness snatched from her by her own careless kin.

He has always tried to direct his sins outward.

And to Nik she grovels, in her climber's gear and her rowboat.

All the furious pens of this world, bleeding justice for those who need it least, will tell you it's because she is woman, and she brews dark magic where a child ought sleep, and summons companions from the pit, and keeps them in tea and biscuits because all man has tired of her sly and instinctive deceits, and keeps her where she belongs.

So she strikes out as only woman can, by taking from man what he deserves, her soft and absolute support.

But all the furious pens of this world with their safe and righteous scribbles are only very small penises on even smaller men.

And no clue how to even compensate for girth, the fumbling flailers.

But she has bruised her knees too often for Nik, hasn't she?

And hardly a glance for you, because there's never a frown to smooth away, your affection need not be won, she can break off a piece here, and here, and never find herself bereft when she comes back for more.

She slides her hand into his when a sleep spasm pops it open.

All these tragedies, Mother.

Humans were never meant to outlive their gods.

But what else to do but live, and live, and fear even more what you do not know?

* * *

"Another horrible murder! Leather Apron at it again!" the newspaper boys cry from their corners, and sashaying along as best she can in these horrid skirts, she smiles round at all these oblivious subjects of hers, jostling elbows with godhood and never the wiser, hidden away as she is by her cheeks like cream, and escorted along by her handsome superior in his dark tails and pressed trousers.

Such a good little girl she is.

But 'Leather Apron' -really, she would never.

Not even dressed in those horrible rags men see fit to deem clothing.

She drapes her hand prettily over Kol's arm and watches the hansom cabs clatter away into the fog, trailing the newspaper boys' dire glee after them, the beasts snorting on obliviously, and straining happily away at their slave traces, the poor stupid things.

Somewhere above this miasma of the city the sky opens.

Kol snaps open the umbrella he is holding with a flourish.

He bows theatrically, and pops it up over her head.

"Thank you, Kol. You're such a gentleman."

"I am, aren't I?" He cocks his head to watch a man with his sideburns in bushy escape from beneath his hat veer off the main street into one of the side alleys. "Dinner?" he asks.

"Love to," she replies, and he leans down as she stands on her tiptoes, and a peck of a kiss that draws not a few eyes, and they separate to corral the human as the beasts are meant to be penned and consumed.

* * *

Bekah is quite thorough with the woman she slits open to the spine and empties in great handfuls.

"This place smells poor," she snips as he leans against the wall with his arms crossed and watches her briefly contemplate the woman's heart before throwing it over a shoulder.

He catches it one-handed, without stirring from his pose, quite a fetching thing, if he says so himself, all of him displayed to best advantage, his tails and dark top coat setting off everything, and Bekah not even looking.

"I didn't eat that for a reason," she tells him as he turns the heart about in his hand, and lets it flow down between his knuckles, for him to lick like some sticky children's treat.

"And that would be, darling?"

"She's a  _prostitute_."

"They have perfectly consumable organs just like everyone else, Bekah. Don't be such a snob."

"Sorry if I have standards. You wouldn't know about that." She flashes him a nasty little smile.

"This is the last one?" he asks, tossing the heart and catching it behind his back with his eyes shut.

He smiles and opens them to find Bekah bent over her task once more, without so much as a glance for him.

He adds the spleen to his acrobatics, and then a kidney, to send them in a flurry round and round his talented hands, so fast he can hardly follow them.

"Yes, she's the last. And then it's his turn. Not for a little while, though; I want him to think about it."

"To feel it coming."

"Yes."

He adds the second kidney, and blurs through a new routine, letting the heart drop from the rotation, and bounce up off his boot right back up into the whole whirling mess, flinging blood everywhere, dirtying the nancy little top hat Bekah has set down on the table beside the bed of her victim, and now that quick temper of hers yanks his sister's eyes from her undertaking, and lands them on his face, coldly enough to freeze the belly of a lesser man.

He smiles. Aren't I talented?" he asks, and she hurls the woman's liver into his act, pegging the heart square on, and knocking it back nearly into his face. He ducks to let it splatter against the wall. "Well, that wasn't very nice."

"Stop playing around, and make yourself useful."

"And snatch this moment of glory right out of your fingers? I would never, Bekah. You do what feels best, darling. This evening is all about you, after all."

She tilts her head. "Do you think I should leave her face? No; he might have liked that," she says, and jams her knife into one of the woman's glassy eyes.

He lets his juggling tumble down to land without fanfare on the floor.

"Do you want it, before I go on, and stab all of the ocular…juices off it?" she asks, holding up the knife and lifting one eyebrow.

He holds out his hand for it.

She pitches it across the room.

He licks carefully down the flat of the blade, and flicks his tongue very gingerly over the tip. "I don't know what it is. There's just something almost sort of…sweet about it. Aren't sheep's eyeballs a delicacy somewhere? You know, they should really think about adding humans' to the menu." He tosses the knife back to her, and she pokes the blade through one cheek till it comes out the other side, the mouth jiggling open in final protest as she wriggles her knife in.

He leans over the bed and dips a finger into the woman's nearly-empty abdomen, and across Bekah's forehead now he paints a thin red line.

"Stop it," she scolds him.

"Come on, darling. Turn that frown upside down," he says, and adds a cheerful flick to either corner of her mouth.

"I said  _stop it_ , Kol."

He hops up beside the corpse's feet to sprawl casually back over the stained bedcovers, bouncing his legs where they dangle over the side of the bed, and letting his hands droop over the sides of his thighs, to sway in the space between his legs.

"Did you love him?" he asks quietly, watching a stray piece of hair make its way out of the knot she has bound it into at the nape of her neck, and float ghost-like before her face as she cuts, and cuts.

His sister is the prettiest butcher you ever did see.

"No," she replies after a while, looking up as he gently picks the hair from her cheek, and tweaks it for a moment between his fingers, feeling along the long soft length of it before relinquishing it once more to the rest of the whole shining mass. "But he could have been nicer to me."

He looks down at his thumbs, to twiddle out his nerves between the two of them, rolling them over and over each other, and adjusting with all his little tricks of the years the timbre of his voice, until it's not weighted with all the yearning of his long and pathetic love, stretched over the centuries but never gone wispy with its elasticity, as such things ought to feather, and fray, but light as he is supposed to be.

He arches his eyebrows. "You know, darling, there are men who will treat you the way you're supposed to be." He pauses for just a moment. "There is a man."

She saws at the woman's nose.

He sits forward and rests his hands on his knees.

She flicks the tip of the woman's nose off the end of her knife at him, not lifting her head but looking up from beneath her eyebrows, and smiling.

"Well, I hope he's handsome."

"Extremely. Sculptors have declared him anatomically flawless, and base all their masterpieces off him."

She rolls her eyes.

"All right; I believe I'm done here. What do you think?" she asks, and sets aside her knife to gesture theatrically at the woman's mangled face, and man or woman, mammal, reptile, he couldn't tell you, she has been so rearranged.

"She's a masterpiece, darling."

Bekah smiles proudly. "He likes the music halls. Tomorrow I'll take you to one of the ballets and you can get a good look at him, before he's similarly ruined. Or is it improved? You saw her face beforehand- what would you say? I think this is rather a step up, actually."

"Don't be so judgmental, darling. Not everyone can look like us."

He stands ands holds out his arm for her.

She retrieves the woman's heart with a sigh, and tosses it to him. "Go ahead and eat it. Just don't breathe on me afterwards."

So of course he drinks deeply of the little mashed thing, and sends a great red exhale right into the center of her face, and exits the woman's room at a sprint, with Bekah right on his tail.

* * *

Lord William Duncan is a bloody magnum opus.

He nearly breaks his neck getting a look at him over the lip of the balcony; Bekah has to pull him back from the edge, and shove him back down into his seat, touching her hair to be sure she hasn't marred it in the struggle, and giving him a subtle little smack with her hand as she adjusts his bow tie. "Stop it, you idiot."

"That's him?"

" _Yes_ , that's him; now conjure up a bit of self-respect for yourself and stop drooling, for God's sake. He's just a human."

"That's easy enough for you to say; you've already solved the mystery of what's underneath his trousers." He leans forward to drape himself over the railing once more. "How big is it?"

"Not big enough to compensate for the fact that he's not nearly as well-versed in using it as he thinks he is."

"I'm not surprised; he has that look about him. However, women are entirely different than men; I'm sure he knows his way round at least his own cock. It's not that different. You just do to your partner's what you want done to yours. And as we all know, he's had quite a lot done to his." He smiles up at her.

She twists his bow tie tight enough to strangle him. "Sit here, and don't make a peep," she hisses, raising him up nearly off his chair, so that they are nose to nose.

"Willy!" he calls out loudly as she lets loose of him, and leans over the balcony with his most winning smile, straightening his bow tie and licking a suggestion over his bottom lip -tried and true method, darlings, and no man or woman who could resist it yet- Bekah appearing at his shoulder with her own saucy little beckon, no clue in her eyes or smile of the mangling she's sure to mete out later, to him or her little victim, what prophet could foretell who shall go first?

The man straightens from where he leans over one of the supper tables and smiles up at Bekah.

"Can I call you Willy? My sister's told me so much about you- I feel we know each other already." He lifts one of his eyebrows as the man looks him over, and takes a good long drink of his cheekbones, smoothly out of step with the current bearded fashions of the day.

Nothing to snag on his cock, anyway.

"Come join us," Bekah does not so much invite as order, and like every man to whom she crooks her finger, the dashing Lord Duncan makes his way up to their private nook, hat under his arm, another smile for them both.

"We haven't had the pleasure," he says politely.

"Kol Mikaelson. Eight inches."

"Excuse me?"

He lets his smile deepen. "Eight finches. That's how many of the things they had flying round in here earlier- did you hear about that?"

"I did not," Duncan says. "And it's 'William', actually. Delighted to meet you."

"You will be."

William falters just a bit, and shifts the hat to his other arm, sneaking a glance at Rebekah, who has just barely kept hold of her own smile, and locked her hand round his arm, to dig her nails into the underside of it, where she can get at the meat of him.

"I've heard a lot of praise for this particular ballet- have you seen it before?" he asks Bekah.

"No; I thought with my brother visiting me, now would be the perfect time to take it in."

"And where are you visiting from?"

"Russia, actually. I'm a Senior Gunner in the army."

William smiles politely. "Well, whatever butting of the heads our countries may have experienced, you have my welcome. Not originally from there, I assume, unless you assimilate all the accents of your holiday destinations?"

"Yes, actually. I assimilate every bit of any of the cultures I visit. The accents, the customs, the cocks."

William blinks. "Excuse me?"

"The  _clocks_ ," he repeats loudly, leaning in just a bit closer. "I'm a bit of a collector."

Bekah smiles sunnily. "And he isn't playing round about that. He's probably a thousand of them from all over the globe."

"I cannot resist them here, I cannot resist them there, I cannot resist them anywhere."

Bekah's hand has loosened on his arm.

Her smile is no longer a mask, the menace just dripping from it.

"Everyone has their passions. I myself am something of an artist, actually. A burgeoning one, of course, but we all start somewhere."

"Really? Well, I'm available for portrait sittings anytime."

"Oh, brilliant! Rebekah never wants to sit for them; bit of stage fright, I suspect."

"That is one of my sister's only flaws. Her pervading modesty has always been a beacon to us all."

The boy's face softens a bit as he turns his eyes to Bekah in all her glory, the murder just radiating out of her. "Let her be an example to us all, in these trying times," he says, and all round them the lights begin to dim and the conversation to die its final whispered deaths, and with a "Shall we?" and an expansive gesture, Bekah motions them all to their seats, and puts herself right between the two of them.

She presses her lips to his ear as the stage brightens. "New plan. Get caught somewhere in public with him."

He smiles and takes the pretty white hand she lays across the armrest between them.

"I thought you'd never ask, Bekah. It's much nicer when there's no one home in such a pretty house; it's much easier to break it," he says, and looks across to his sister's oblivious little lord, putting a thumb to the dimple in his chin and letting his head sag into this contemplative pose, and looking up from beneath his eyebrows with the wickedest of all his smiles when the boy glances his way.

* * *

Kol gets to work the very next day, with the news of this latest and most horrendous of murders just a pall over London, and the poor boy still pale with it, but gamely inquiring after this great collection of clocks he has heard such tale of.

"Actually," she says, arranging her skirts prettily round her, and making just a picture of herself, with the unspoiled white hands in her lap, and the ringlets she compelled from a glass-eyed housemaid, "I'm feeling a bit ill today. I was wondering if perhaps you could take my brother out, for some sightseeing? He hasn't been here in such a long time, and I'd hate for him to miss out on all London has to offer, with me shut up in here, and him bouncing round the place, just bored out of his mind."

It's no trouble at all, certainly, pretty little William assures her.

Isn't that just lovely of him.

She smiles and lets him bow and fuss over her hand and sneak her one of those sly little winks when her brother's back is turned and really, they're so utterly predictable, humans.

You're boring her already.

Kol turns back in the doorway to give her a lift of his brow and a lick of his lips, and a twitch of his bow tie and a flare of the coat hem round his calves (men are so dreadfully theatrical) and he strolls after her human, twirling the top hat in his hands.

Lovely little Kol, injecting all the color into her black and brotherless world.

* * *

Heterosexuals are not particularly difficult.

Or maybe that's just him.

You've seen him, after all.

A man's proclivities are just as bendy as his morals, and if you have not taken a thousandth turn round this world and found yourself with years still to burn, and youth still in your limbs, and the seasons blurry with use, one run into another, still you shall have noticed that goodness is the most elastic of all the body.

Except the liver.

Rubbery, a bit stringy- he doesn't like it at all, darlings.

So his preferences can be bent just as easily as his virtue, and it's no different from seducing any raw young vixen behind her fan, except you want to dodder on about his cleverness a bit more, and marvel at his masculinity, and sweep off your hat to his superior brain, and make all your barbs slender, and easily slipped between compliments.

Death by a thousand cuts, and the victim never the wiser as he bleeds away his youth.

A touch of the knees underneath a table in the Athenaeum's Smoking Room and a patient smile at this accidental intimacy, because what draws friends closer than a thoroughly masturbated ego?

Love and loyalty and that homoerotic -you see, most of them are already halfway there- familiarity of adopted brotherhood; of course, of course.

All very nice, darling.

But let him press his lips to the ear of your self-worth, and whisper it to full length, and stroke it plump.

Do you like that?

Feels good, doesn't it?

And his hand on your knee- what a little non-event that is, between brothers.

Taste of his cigar?

Sip of his brandy?

You might well as get used to the taste of his lips.

* * *

Gentleman's clubs are a step all their own.

Round of billiards; round of smoking; round of cards; and round again, men, before the tits expect you home, and round again, then, because what man lets his lady hold the leash?

So cocks, cocks, as far as the eye can see, and all of them flush with the godliness of this superior gender with his straight hips, his trendy moustache, his firm arms.

Well, not that one.

Wobbling along like a pig, with breasts to rival his sister's.

A full meal in that one, though, he thinks, and tosses back his drink.

He wanders the rooms with Bekah's lord, to watch this charade of man on man (and nothing but the chasteness of Christ between them all, he believes that, darling, those two in the corner, for instance, the one with the lashes like a girl's, and the other leaning in, leaning in, and both of them laughing too loudly for either non-drunks or non-lovers), smoking the cigar William has assured him he 'simply  _must_ ' try, and puffing out the stale mediocrity into the faces of the most lemony-lipped of them all.

You're boring him, darling.

You don't want to bore him.

Mahogany walls, fresh felt on the billiards tables, bookcases to the ceiling, the chairs hand-carved and the statues masterly done, etc. etc. yawn blah.

He doesn't care.

He puts the cigar out on a sketch left out for the admiration of all while its artist nips off to the toilet.

"Come on now, darling. You can do better than this," he tells his new friend. "There's got to be something more to London than this, hasn't there?"

For instance, his sister has not left him unenlightened as to the beatings you give and receive between the sheets, and the particular variety of whorehouse you frequent, and the aristocratic curiosity which draws you to the docks where the fog is densest, and the crimes the vilest, and the workers roughest.

"What would you like to see?" William asks accommodatingly, and he smiles, and claps him on the back.

Well, you know, he's been in the army such a long time.

Wedged shoulder to shoulder with his brothers, and all other manner of hairy brutes ripe with their horses and their months at field.

Breathing in all the stink and sweat of them, and only a few paltry peasant women to be shared between all, and him end of the line and just lonely, so lonely, darling.

* * *

A flagellation brothel is one of those ideas of man equally inspired in theory and poor in execution.

After all.

What whore can wield her whip hard enough to leave aught but a little fly sting along his back?

Bekah would make a good show of it, but you know his sister, nose like a queen's, and never low enough to so much as catch a glimpse of a place like this, on its knees (pardon his little pun here, go on, darling, you're doing well enough with that tongue, for a human) in the muck, and splashed to the chin with it.

So he waves the whip off, and lets the whore slob away at his lap, and thinks of the noises from the next room over, where this new friend of his must be buried to the hilt, and pumping for all he's worth, gasping out his pleasure between his pretty lips, and arching his delicious young throat.

She gets a mouthful of him, and he of her.

Fair enough, darling.

He takes the whip home.

Never know when a thing like that might come in handy.

* * *

The trick to seduction is subtlety.

You might not know he's capable of that.

But separate rooms first, and different girls, and each of them listening to the other, and perhaps William, young and with all the blood still hot and new in him, picturing his own romps as he pictures the pretty lord's, and wondering how he takes his whores, on all fours or with legs over his shoulders.

He fucks the girl with the pretty blonde ringlets that remind him of Bekah's against the wall, until she comes with a scream and a spasm hard enough to milk him.

And then he hears the snap of the crop, and the boy on the other side moaning with the landing of it, his blood fresh enough to twitch him inside her.

He pulls her off him and leans against the wall as she takes his cock in her mouth and noisily stuffs the whole length of him back into her throat, listening for the whistle of that whip, and the pleasure of the boy, thrusting his head back against the wall and arching his back into a second release.

* * *

And then you take away the separate rooms, and the different girls.

You flood each of you to the gullet with alcohol, till you're stumbling with the slosh of it, and neither of you with your sea legs, holding up one another with those ridiculous giggles of the drunken.

And of course it's no trouble, one girl, two men; it's how some like it, is all, and here at Lola's House of Whatever, we cater to every sin.

So you nibble at the girl first, from behind, licking along her neck, and pressing a few human teeth marks into her jugular, and you let this straight and narrow boy, with his pure and simple lust take the front, and keep those precious few inches between man and man, and touch only the delicate organs God meant for his natural desires.

You suck the girl's earlobe.

You creep your hand around her waist to fondle one breast while he strokes the other.

And down her thigh, and across her skirts, to cup her from the outside, and inflame her through her lightly soiled silk.

You accidentally brush his cock.

And does it wilt automatically, at this forbidden touch, and wither away in indignation?

No.

But you see it's safe, with the girl between you, rubbing herself against the length of you, and the fog of alcohol, and who knows what finger tread that light and feathery path down the front of it, and anyway, your mouth is full of breast, and your hand up under the skirts to feel the clit, and marvel at the warmth and ready slickness of it, you just radiate your manliness, fervent slayer of ladies that you are.

* * *

Opium dens are harder to find than the moralistic prattling of Dickens and his contemporaries would suggest.

But every young gentlemen with his wild oats still to sow knows his way round the working class streets in which they are tucked away.

He doesn't like these piddling little opium-laced cigarettes that give him no greater kick than a sip of some watered-down pub beer.

But not a few of the men have laid out their heroin needles alongside their pipes and ashtrays, so he rolls up a sleeve and taps the syringe airless, fills himself with a solution that goggle-eyes the awe of the other users, and passes the needle off to William as the first rush of the drug floats him above all his petty immortal concerns.

They take their pipes and cigarettes to one of the private back rooms, scattered about with those garish pillows meant to evoke some faraway land of tea and spice, and he smokes one of these cigarettes that puts a bit more wobble in the room now, with the heroin burning off quickly but still surging masterfully, the boy shuddering happily against the wall, his lashes flickering.

He watches the room fluctuate round him, and lifts his lead hand to take another sip of his cigarette, and blow it toward the boy, who breathes it in gratefully.

"The brothels again, after this?" William asks, wiping his damp hands down his trousers.

"Mm," he says.

Which is what you're about to be moaning, darling, imagine the coincidence of that.

"It feels so nice here. I wish they'd just come to us."

He blows a soft ring toward the ceiling.

William licks his lips, neck arched nicely as he leans his head against the wall. "Amen to that, my friend. We wouldn't have to go so far, though. Just down to the docks. They loiter round waiting for the sailors."

He blows another ring, and then passes off the whole thing to the boy. "You wait here, darling, and I'll bring us one."

* * *

William helps her drowsily with his trousers, pulling them down just enough for his cock to spring free, and her to lower herself over the tip of it as she straddles him.

He watches her dispassionate professionalism as she thrusts away, till the boy is rigid with the brink of his orgasm, his hands in fists at his sides.

"All right, darling, off with you," he whispers in her ear, and looks her deep in the eyes.

"What the hell?" William asks blurrily as she pulls down her skirts and lets herself quietly out of the room. "Where the bloody hell is she going?"

"I don't know; not all there, probably, poor darling," he replies, and takes the cigarette from the boy's slack idiot lips. "That's quite a situation you've got."

"Bloody hell," he mumbles, fighting the breath back into his nostrils.

"Finish yourself off. Or do you want me to do it for you?"

That pops his eyes open. "Christ, man! How could you say that? You've had too much. Put the bloody thing out, if it's going to have you making suggestions like that."

He inhales unhurriedly, and holds the smoke in his lungs for a drowsy moment. "So have you." He cocks his head. "You probably won't even remember it in the morning."

"Of course I would. It's vile. We wouldn't even be men anymore, to have engaged in something like that."

He blows another long ring into the boy's face. "You were never a military man, were you?"

"What's that got to do with anything?"

He taps the cigarette onto the floor. "No women as far as the eye can see, and whole lots of rowdy young men flush with their own masculinity, some with a gun in their hand for the first time, and the vague specter of death hovering over them? What do you think happens?"

William blinks. "That's obscene."

"It's convenient, darling. Nothing's made of it; you just don't talk about it afterward." He holds his hands out to either side. "I'm sure you won't argue that those men in their uniforms, mud on their cheeks, kills under their belts, the cold courage of a nighttime skirmish, when you can hardly see friend let alone enemy, all of them popping up out of the trees like ghosts- surely you wouldn't accuse them of unmanliness?"

"Of course not!" he says with all the fire and brimstone of a youth who has never seen this coveted war of which he has heard so much.

He smudges the cigarette out on one of the pillows, and rests one of his hands on the boy's knee.

He smiles. "Just shut your eyes, and picture your prettiest favorite. And then it doesn't even count, do you see?"

The boy is trembling, with his comedown or his lust, who knows, so he slides his hand from knee to thigh, and lets this pretty plaything of Bekah's decide which it is, and whether he's to give in to either.

"You're not even a bit curious?" he whispers, and experimentally runs his palm over the very tip of the boy's cock. "Imagine, darling, how well a whore knows her way round a cock, and multiply it tenfold for a man who knows just what he wants done to himself, and can apply that just as easily to his friend."

William shoots a hand out nervously to grab his wrist, but he doesn't move the fingers hovering over his cock.

So he makes an 'o' of his fist, and slowly, slowly eases it over the tip and down the shaft, and with his other hand he grabs the boy by the throat and nearly puts his head through the wall, he slams him that hard against it, and throat still in his hand, cock in fist, he gives the man a brutal kiss that knocks their teeth together.

And the boy shudders, and deep down in the bowels of his soul, with his fundamental truths of man and woman pin tidy, he excuses himself, and comes all across another man's hand with a sharp gasp.

* * *

You see, it's not that the boy's sexuality is really so liquid.

It's just the temptation of the forbidden.

And full to the brim with liquor, and heroin just shy of killing him, he's hardly to blame for what sins might be conducted in this haze.

But it's still another boy mouthing the head of your cock, and oiling it all the way to its base with a swipe of his tongue, darling.

And when they are both half-unconscious with all their vices, and side by side, head to toe, and the first hand to start groping about isn't his own?

He moves his hips languidly forward into the boy's hand, and then his mouth, and unbuttons William's trousers, and takes him all the way to the back of his throat in one wet stroke.

* * *

Oh, there are still whores.

But note what really puts a kink in the boy's toes.

The same dead-eyed women plying their trade with wooden skill, and the same old rhythm, and the bone-dry allure of these creatures polite gentlemen are not supposed to touch?

He thinks not, darling.

But when he runs a tongue down the boy's spine, and lower still?

William lifts his head from between the whore's legs and he gathers the blankets up in one desperate clutch and pants frantically, till he does it again, and startles a loud cry out of him.

But still you've got to dip a toe into these things.

So he lets William fuck the whore in triumphal manliness, and merely rubs himself against the boy's thrusting ass, till they both are spent.

* * *

And then one night between hits on pipe and needle, the pillows round them already stained with earlier trysts, he slicks the boy's cock with some unguent the whores use to gentle their work, and takes down his trousers.

It takes a bit.

With the boy just sort of nervously thrusting between his thighs, and tiptoeing round where they both want him.

He leans back into him, and loops an arm round his neck, and turns his head to kiss with tongues and not much else, their lips barely grazing.

And then he tips himself forward onto his hands and knees, and feels the head of the boy's cock slip with some uncertainty inside him, the boy panting but frozen.

He braces himself on his forearms.

William pulls back just a bit, and then surges in a little deeper.

And another stroke, the boy shivering with it, and already close, if he's not mistaken.

"Oh God. Oh bloody hell, it's tight," he gasps out, and thrusts himself a little farther in. "I'm going to- I'm going to- oh Christ-" He feels all the boy's nails puncture his hips, and another short pump, and then a warm surge, William shuddering all over with the force of it, and giving one more thrust to clean him out, and then a second urge suddenly seizing hold of the boy, and he flailing away almost frantically, nearly sobbing with his exertions, both of them breathing noisily through their noses, his own mouth slack to make way for all his little pleasure noises, the whole misty moment stretching, and stretching, till he's nearly blind with it, those little spots dancing round his eyes, and dimming the room, and the heroin fizzy in his veins, and fuzzy in his brain.

* * *

Scandal of the century, darlings!

An outrage to oust Jack the Ripper himself!

No heart untouched!

No ear unwhispered!

What have the ages come to!

And the youth, oh, the youth! Those unassailable paragons of virtue, brought up so precisely correct, heavy on the flog, heavier on the books, oh where appeared the rocks, and who can have foreseen the fatal punctures?!

Lord William Duncan, 29, esteemed member of The Athenaeum, promising painter, flourishing intellectual, talented hunter, strong of jaw, masculine of conduct, snagged trousers-down in a public toilet with an unidentified man, getting his drunken rocks off.

He hears the faceless partner dashingly escaped arrest.

But not before looking the discovering copper straight in the eye, and coming in the esteemed Lord Duncan's ass with that astonished watcher gawping and gawping, and him smiling, and asking (husky with his exertions, and all the more seductive for it), "Do you want the next round, darling?" and dodging the copper's truncheon so deftly, while the poor Lord Duncan took a full swing of it to his pretty cheek.

Now how's that for flair, darlings?

* * *

She browses her collection of leftovers, tapping the jars with her finger as she goes, no, no, no, testicles, testicles, testicles -so many of them; she ought to clean out a few, one is much the same as the other, after all- and selecting at last the organs she's preserved from her latest escapades, snug in their smelly chemicals, and almost pretty, the way they catch the light, wouldn't you say?

Kol slings himself over the nearest chair to watch, smug with his success.

"So what horrors await our friend as he rots his way toward his trial?"

She smiles.

Well you see, dear brother.

A lady always leaves one waiting.

She's worth it, after all.

Well, she is.

One never can tell with humans.

So all genteel fingers, and ladylike primness, with her hair perfectly coiffed, and her skirts prettily spread, she carefully embroiders Annie Chapman's uterus and holds it up for her brother's inspection.

"The spelling's horrid, of course, but the papers have splashed this nonsense all about now, so it'll certainly make an impression."

"I think it's very nice, Bekah," he says, and sticks one of those horrid opium cigarettes in his mouth as he leans back in the chair across from her sofa.

She yanks it away from him and tosses it onto the floor.

"Smoke outside, you coarse pig," she snaps.

He smiles like the utter unrepentant ass he is, and takes out another.

She tips her head and lets her eyes go cold as the October morning breathing its rime and fog from what depths even creatures such as herself have yet to mine, and puts it out on his cheek when he sets his lighter to the tip.

And he smiles again, the ass, and leans forward with his hands clasped between his knees, and ticks the end of her nose with his finger.

"Well, have fun with your toy today, darling. And don't wait up." He picks up the baseball bat he's leant against the side of his chair, tool of the legendary Pete Browning himself, the original Louisville Slugger, he has made sure to prattle on at her while stroking the stupid thing like it's either lover or victim, and proudly pointing out the splash of brown he says is the remnant of some copper who died particularly badly.

He hefts it over his shoulder now, and is sure to walk himself backward into the main hall, so that he can smirk at her all the way, and make crude pantomime with his stupid little stick, waggling his tongue as he goes.

She rolls her eyes, and tidies the work in her lap, smoothing her fingers over the loops of her fine craftsmanship.

It's lovely.

William will just adore it.

She spritzes it with her priciest perfume, and wraps it in her prettiest bows, and boxes it so nicely for her trip to the jailer, looping the string over her arm, and posing for the looking glass through the millinery evolution of today's lavender and cream ensemble.

* * *

_I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red thread is fit enough I hope ha ha._

* * *

The fit of them is simply atrocious, of course, but she likes the freedom of men's trousers, and the flair of their coats, and the ladies simpering at such a fair and delicate young 'lord', pretty as themselves.

Prettier.

Do you see how she kicks one victim to the ground, and pins him with the toe of her boot, and none of her tousled, not a hair out of place, the color up in her cheeks, and her lips red as rouge, just a portrait of the masters, here with the rain darkening her lashes, and the film of these hovels not daring so much as a flake on one unblemished inch?

She licks her fingers.

Excessive drinker; hint of cocaine; exclusive diner.

Not a smoker.

What a nice surprise.

She holds out her hand to her brother.

He sucks the last of it from her thumb.

"Whitechapel?" he asks.

"I don't eat slum rats," she snaps. "You know my taste is much superior to yours."

"I know a place," he says right into her ear, and leads the way twirling his bat.

* * *

She lets him stew for three days in his fear, and gradually let the anxiety go out of him with time, and quiet, and the weight of his more earthly concerns -all those reporters, poor man- and then she sends him Catherine Eddowes' kidney.

* * *

Kol likes to prowl Chamber St. where the men are looking for pretty young things like themselves, and can duck after their selections into the poorly-lit side streets to have their unlawful ways with them.

He shaves himself clean, and wears a coat a size too large for him, so that he's dwarfed by it, and made to swim in its folds, his shoulders slimmed by this theatrical illusion, and with her hair tucked neatly up under the top hat he sets at a rakish angle, and her breasts bandaged back to childhood, they stroll side by side in the poor lighting, Kol's shadow preceding them monstrously, her breath nearly as visible as the bloody cigarette she bloody well _told_ him to put out, the rain dribbling down her neck like those arctic fingers of human premonition.

She draws in a breath.

He flicks his cigarette into a puddle.

The sky gives a great crack.

He's such an overdone twit, unbuttoning his coat so that it will billow dramatically out behind him as he walks, and lightning another of those horrid things just so that you hear first the footsteps, and then see that little red pinprick through the fog, bobbing along, bobbing along, the whole tit and caboodle.

She rolls her eyes, and adjusts her hat.

"Two shilling for the both of us," Kol tells a man who walks with that jerky haste of the anxious, and stands there smoking his cigarette like it's no never mind to him, cupping his hands round it.

The man smoothes a hand down his cravat. "How old is the little one?" he asks, licking his lips nervously, and tipping his head toward her.

Kol lifts his head to blow a long white stream. "Fourteen."

The man looks her timidly over, wiping his hands down his trousers.

She lowers her lashes demurely.

"All right," he says, and pivots away to hurry down one of the nearby alleys, where the lights do not reach, and the rain pounds all the harder, and there's not a whisper of man, shut away behind his sleeping doors, his windows shuttered till daybreak.

Her brother smudges out his cigarette.

He winks at her.

She follows on his heels, just a poor cringing thing, out for his first time, and skittish with his nerves.

"I've never done anything like this before," the man blurts out, wiping his upper lip, and looking terrified as Kol stops before him, and she draws up at his shoulder. "Do we- do I-"

"Relax," Kol says, and crowds him against the back wall. "I know just what I'm doing."

Jack, darling.

Give the man's backside some attention? he asks her, and slides his hand down the man's trousers.

She kisses along the quivering back of his neck as Kol runs his tongue down the man's throat and into the hollow of his collarbone, and with all sorts of noises coming out of him as her brother strokes him almost to completion, she trails her fingers lightly up the nape of his neck into his hair, and yanks his head back.

"You might want to scream now," she whispers in his ear, and sinks her teeth into his throat.

Kol jerks him down by the chin. "If we like it enough, we might make it quick," he says, and kisses the man roughly.

She angles her head a bit more and punctures the carotid.

"Is that all you've got in you, darling? Come on and have a look at her face, and tell me you can't conjure up something better than that pitiful little whistle."

She cranks the man's head round so that he gets the full up-close of her wet red fangs, and what a noise comes out of him, not loud, but so shrill, and no end in sight as he soaks the front of his trousers.

"Lovely," she says, and rips off his head.

* * *

Kol left only a scrap of Mary Kelly's heart, but it's enough to get the point across.

She wraps it in the bow from the hat he bought her, and signs it as an artist would, in cramped and looping script.

* * *

They corner another man on Chamber St.

She takes a sip from his neck from behind as Kol presses himself hip to hip with the man, and sucks at his shoulder with still-human teeth.

"Ouch! You bit me!" the half-wit cries out, and swats in blind irritation at her.

She breaks his hand.

Kol leans in over his shoulder, his eyes half-shut, and she lets him taste the man on the end of her tongue as he screams, their lips not touching, their tongues in languorous exploration, her brother breathing noisily through his nose.

"Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ, you little  _bastard_! You broke my fucking hand! My  _fucking_ hand!" he keens, cradling it stiffly against him, Kol pulling back, and she scooping up that last little blot of red she missed with her fingers, and licking it from their ends.

"Show a bit of respect, darling. She's a bitch," Kol says, and tears into the man's jugular like a wild dog.

* * *

He's sitting so morosely in his cell when she pops by for her final visit, poor thing.

Prison has taken the handsome right out of him.

"Hello, William," she says, and gives him her prettiest smile.

* * *

_**Ghastly Murder of Lord William Duncan** _

_Two weeks following his arrest for indecent liberties, the Lord William Duncan was found murdered in his cell at Newgate Prison where he was awaiting trial. In gruesome tragedy does this fearful scandal end, with the promising young member of The Athenaeum discovered sitting almost neatly on his bunk, with his head in his lap and the top of his scalp sliced off. His brain was missing and his skull found stuffed full of human organs which remain unidentified, due to the state of them. Prison officials are scrambling to determine how such an atrocity could possibly have occurred with several men on watch, and the prisoner safely locked away._

* * *

The first time she kissed him was in 1217.

He was smeared in human, and he smelled delicious.

So you will think that she kissed him because death is a fascination for those who go on ducking and ducking it, and any fascination in these numberless years of dusty unlife must be tested with the tips of the fingers, and tasted on the edge of the tongue, and made into a thing of bright and shiny novelty however you must twist it to see a new angle.

And such a fresh and shiny sin, lovely as her first kill.

So many men, so many men, but never this one who slept chastely beside her when the storms howled at the doors like gods come down for her soul.

But she's much worse than that.

She knew he wouldn't ignore her afterward.

That's all.

Always panting round after the lot of them, and trying to stick his foot into the cracks that from time to time wedge the indissoluble three wide enough for him to hope.

She remembers he kissed her back not at all tentatively, in a rush to deepen everything, to reach the threshold where dallies the last hesitation, and to cross it to that beyond land of no return before she remembered there are some upon whom even eternal minutes are spent in waste.

She remembers she didn't even undress him.

Just moved his hose out of the way, and straddled him with her skirt hiked to her waist.

And Kol laying his head on her breast, and breathing like a man dying.

Nik doesn't know, of course.

What's to know, her brother asked once.

Bekah fucks the nearest warm and willing.

Hardly anything headline-worthy there, darling.

And the youngest Mikaelson licking it up because what else has he to eat?

So she should have stopped there.

She should have stopped there, with him trying to smile and not quite making it, and in his next breath telling her Bekah-

Bekah, he wouldn't leave.

But here she is.

Astride him like he is a piece of meat, leaning forward to kiss the vampire they picked up in one of the music halls, who kneels over her brother's mouth and gasps into hers as Kol takes him all the way to the back of his throat.

The man comes first.

So he is shoved aside, and she rolled over, and now Kol's hips begin to thrust with all the force a human lover cannot take, and she arches, she pulls at his hair, she puts a fist in her mouth as he bites her shoulder and roughly fondles her breast with fingers and tongue.

He comes with his face buried in her shoulder.

* * *

Oh fickle time what shackles dost thy indifferent November cast, something about his gray and yearning heart, etc. etc., and the gathering dust of time and all her wayward dead…maybe an errant sunray through yonder window there…

Well, he gives up.

He's no Nik.

But he did try, didn't he?

Now that deserves a round of applause, doesn't it, darling?

"That wasn't a suggestion, darling," he says to the toy he's brought back to the manor and tied to the chair he likes to think of as his own.

The man awkwardly claps his bound hands, sniffling round his tears, and every so often dribbling his freedom pleas.

"Do you want to hear my Shakespeare?"

"Please just let me go!" the man chokes out.

"All right, all right; I know that's a bit overdone. Elijah would despair of you, though. I have the entire 'Illiad' memorized; let's do that."

He picks up a letter opener from the little side table beside the chair and stabs it into the man's leg.

He screams.

"Sorry- I told a bit of a white lie. I actually only memorized the stabby parts. That's basically the whole poem, though, isn't it? So I still count it." He stabs the man's other leg, and twirls the point round for a bit, until he has opened a hole large enough to crouch down and peer into this shining ruin, and with a tilt of his head he digs out some hard yellow bit for him to examine on the end of the opener.

"What the hell is that?" Bekah demands.

"I think it's a fat deposit. Nik and I dissected one of the soldiers while we were in Russia with Elijah directing us; in his civilian life he's a medical student. We found one of these in the man's arm. He had the nicest spleen I've ever seen; it was practically new. Nik and I squabbled over it for a while, so Elijah made us flip one of his eyeballs for it. We didn't have a coin."

"It looks disgusting."

"Ooh, ooh, I know, Bekah- let's make him eat it."

She sighs and crosses her arms. "I'm tired of playing with this one. The last one was must more entertaining. This one just cries and screams a little. The other at least had some wit about him."

"Well, I'm going to make him eat himself, and I'm going to have a delightful time, sister. If you're going to be such a party pooper, please excuse yourself; you're bringing down the mood."

"Fine; but don't stay up late. You need your beauty sleep."

"No I don't, darling."

"All right, I suppose we're all just pretending we don't see those bags under your eyes, then."

He points his letter opener at the man. "Can you believe this? Women; am I right, darling? Now tell me I'm handsome."

"You're handsome," the man sobs.

"The handsomest man you've ever seen?" he asks teasingly, sawing a long line down the man's other leg.

"Yes! Yes, God, I'll say anything you want, please, just stop!"

"Well, now I feel like you're just saying that to say it. And that hurts my feelings."

He cuts out a thigh tendon.

The man screams again.

"Here, try this. I just can't bear to hear anymore lies out of your mouth, so let's occupy it with something else, shall we, darling?" he asks, and crams the tendon down and down till the man gags on it.

* * *

There was, of course, a catalyst.

All the best villains have one.

There was a girl with gold and shining hair, and pure and noble heart, and she was far too good, darlings, for his soul of soot and grime, but the best judge not a man by his actions, and tally all the tragedies Fate has stacked against his hale and enduring angst.

For instance.

Once he had a pet human.

His brother ate it.

And the Prague Incident- let him set his hand to his forehead, and swoon into the handsomest of the arms closest to him, and tell you all about it.

(Also he lost to his sister a maiden whose proportions might well have withered the fair Helen of Troy in her pale and homely inferiority. It was a swipe made of spite, but he put the girl's family on spikes, and dressed up the entry hall of his castle with their final frightened stares -it was quite homey, the torches stretching their long fingers to the ceilings, and making of each corner a horned stranger, and all the while those eyes steering you past in mute and fumbling panic -ah, you should have seen it, darlings- so that Bekah had to endure a whole ten minutes of sniveling before she tired of it and ate her way through to the center of that pretty young throat. So you see he came out the high end of that one after all.)

But anyway.

Much sadness, oh, the long fist-shaking of his dusty obdurate years, reeling on and on! The manly war cries sent heavenward, and the breast bared to nature's worst, STRIKE ME DOWN FOUL CENTURIES THY SCYTHE HAS FALLEN ASTRAY TOO OFTEN!

So the girl loved him despite all this, and dabbed away the tingliest of his tears, and in him blossomed a pure and noble man to deserve her pure and noble heart, and then, dear Readers-

Mid-evening, some cruel and fickle swipe of mortality took her right from his sleeping arms.

And how he raged, darlings!

So you see, then, he has his excuses.

Mm.

He doesn't like that one, actually.

There was a boy.

Long before the years sanded away that subtle demarcation between good/evil, and all the thick and inviolable lines of man's sexuality, in the very prehistoric years of his youth, before one understands a hole is a hole, there was a boy whose hands demonstrated what made those long shadows writhe like so, and cry out as in a last death throe.

And let's see…the boy led him a merry chase…well into that fatal tumble of head over heels…and…then…the boy died? Left him?

Left him, he thinks. And for some proper skirt who'd birth him a whole litter of proper babies, and with her perceptive squint put to an end those heady forest rendezvous of hasty hands and loving lips.

Also the boy died.

And how he raged, darlings!

You'd like that, wouldn't you?

To put a face to his mutilations, his eviscerations, to say to yourself yes it was this, here is the reason, you see he just  _hurts_ so  _badly_ and nowhere to put it and no one to  _understand_ , give this man his waiting lap and his tender hand- if just one kind soul had pet him softly, and cooed over his wounds-

But actually-

He got bored.

So you see why he goes round so cheerfully, nailing shut the door of this milliner's shop with the pretty wooden sign, and putting a skip in his step as he peeks round for any observers and then pirouettes gracefully past the window, waving as he goes, and zipping himself right to the back door to secure this one as well while inside the late workers begin to murmur amongst themselves, and give their first confused yanks on the front door.

He slips the bottle from the inner pocket of his coat.

This is his finest vodka, straight from Russia, darlings.

Isn't that thoughtful of him?

One sip for him; that's a good bloody burn.

Put hair on his chest.

Not that he needs anymore, manly as he is.

He begins to whistle one of Nik's favorite tunes, and artfully splashes the vodka over the front of the shop.

Someone begins to bang on the door, and loudly demands their release.

He likes your spirit.

Tell you what he's going to do.

He sets the door on fire.

The murmurs rise, and elongate into screams.

He kicks out the window.

You've always got to give them a bit of hope, after all.

The first one through he gives a good slosh of the vodka, and a strike of his match and he shoves the woman back into the room just smoking and screaming her head off.

She hits a table full of sketches and upends the whole thing, the papers scattering all about her.

He takes another drink, throws in the bottle, listens to it smash, watches the wet dark spread of it, over the woman, over the papers, the flames really beginning to crackle now, the screams to scale.

Music to his ears, darlings.

Do you know Ave Maria?

He likes that one.

He strolls casually away down the street, and hails a hansom.

* * *

It's always when he hates himself most that he comes to her bed.

So he puts another partner between them, or two, or three, and pretends it's only a bit of revelry, Kol the Undiscerning, come one and all, but you see, she knows.

And anyway she can taste the desperation in his kisses.

Just love him more, whatever he has to do.

So he's struck out with Nik once again, she understands, and holds him down by the throat as the little blonde boy with the green eyes unbuttons Kol's trousers, licks and bites his way down his stomach to his cock, takes it clear to the back of his throat with a long slow slide of his full lips, begins to bob his head in earnest as her brother claws at her hand and makes such noisily entertaining death rattles.

She tilts her head as she studies his face.

You'll find no quarter in her soft girl's arms, little brother.

It's not often a boy of your magnitude submits himself like this, after all.

She thinks she'll picture Nik's face.

"Bekah," he gasps, and strains up against her hand as the boy slobs away, and she hears the bones of his toes creak as he curls them so hard he nearly breaks them and now up go his slender hips as one hand fumbles down to grab the boy by the roots of the hair, and holds on for dear life as she squeezes all the light out of his eyes.

Maybe if you'd come to see her just to see her.

She lets go of his neck and shuts his eyes.

* * *

"Do you think Sherlock Holmes would catch you, if he was real?" He smoothes his 1887 issue of Beeton's Christmas Annual over his lap.

"Who?" Bekah asks, fussing over her testicle collection, and rearranging the jars to some system of alphabetics, aesthetics, whatever, that he can't quite make out.

"Sherlock Holmes. Do you think he'd be able to solve this little Jack the Ripper conundrum?"

"I don't know who that is." She picks up one of the jars and smiles at it.

"He's a detective. He's smarter than everyone. He's also a bit of a bastard. I like him. I think he could take you down a peg or two."

"I doubt it." She puts the jar back, picks up another, purses her lips, sets it just to the left of the first. "This is uneven; I have an odd number of testicles."

He leans forward to put his elbows on his knees and smiles at her. "Well you're not welcome to mine. But don't be sad, Bekah. I'm sure we can find another pair somewhere. It can be my early Christmas present to you."

She turns round to face him, and smiles. "I'd like that. Thank you, Kol. You've always been my favorite."

"No I haven't," he says, but he keeps the ache of this out of his voice.

He's had much practice, after all.

He returns to his magazine, but still she keeps looking at him, and he yearns with all his small and pathetic heart, let her think about that a while, and maybe- maybe come round?

* * *

He knows he's only a body.

But sometimes she lets him stay.

So long after she has dropped off to sleep he lies curled round her, not with his arms over her, she doesn't like that, to be held like she matters, because you see, it isn't happiness Bekah's after, not really, not when the years have dangled it just out of reach, and snatched it back soon as she's grazed it.

Maybe it's a sort of divine retribution.

All those years, and none of them bending your back, or crippling your knee, or spotting your face.

Ah, supple youth, and all its bendy freedom.

But feel for the untold time the pit in your stomach as you fuck your sister just to keep yourself relevant, and with playboy smirk in place pretend you do not see her picturing your brother, and muffling his name in your shoulder.

And lie beside her with the soft breath full in her breast, and the hair unwound down her back, and love her, and love her, and dream to yourself of replacing everyone, Nik, Elijah, this week's handsome mistake, and remembering, because you will never not have the time to puzzle it out, she will always choose more wisely.

So if you give Man enough time, and every advantage.

For all your beauty, darlings, and your brawn, and all the ageless marrow of your bones, you will hate yourself.

And that is Man's truth.

* * *

Kol is positively raucous on their next outing.

He steals a hansom and lashes it on like a madman, careening through the streets, past the shops, scattering news boys, chimney sweeps, constables, the cobbles underfoot jouncing her absolutely everywhere, the wind nearly carrying her hat from her head, some shrill bitch screaming as a wheel crushes her foot, and all the while her brother smiling like a boy, and kissing to the horse as he touches the whip to it.

Four mounted constables force their lathered horse into an empty alley, and seal off the exit.

Kol courteously helps her down, and she tilts her chin and she thins her lips and she demands to know the meaning of this, so that they are put on the wrong foot, and struck with the sudden and absurd urge to make their apologies.

"Which one do you like, brother?"

He holds his arm out for her to set her hand prettily on his forearm. "The one on the far left, I think, Bekah. He's clearly the handsomest of them all."

"I agree. I think we'll keep him."

* * *

And for three days they do, experimenting with all those human curiosities that still crop up from time to time, where does this lead, what does that feed, for how long can man live without this organ or that little tube.

And lovely Kol.

Always so punctual with his promises.

She adds another jar to the sill.

* * *

She is lying on her side one night, blinking up into the moonlight, when he stirs at her back.

"Bekah," he says.

It's not his usual cavalier voice, and oh, don't go on, brother.

You will never know what it does to her.

"Maybe I don't have to go back to Nik."

She pulls the sheets over her, to keep anything between them.

"Maybe I could stay here. Or we could go somewhere else."

She feels him sidle closer, one cautious inch at a time, and tentatively rest his fingertips against the small of her back, and tangle them in one of the curls there.

"Kol."

"If you don't want to see Nik anymore, that's fine. We could go, just the two of us. And that's how it could be."

She slithers her arm slowly along the bed in front of her, so he doesn't know what she's doing, and wipes her eyes. "You're not going to spend the rest of your life without Nik, Kol."

"I could. If you wanted to come with me."

And then he slips his arms round her and he knows she doesn't like that, he knows it's against these unspoken rules with which they draw their boundaries, but he needs it more, or she hasn't fooled him at all, he can smell the tears on her cheeks, or he hears the tremor in her voice and he's trying, poor sweet young thing, with all his eight and terrible centuries forgotten because his sister's crying.

"You know we can't do that, Kol."

"But I love you," he says into the hair at the nape of her neck.

She takes the hand that's stolen round her ribcage, and she presses it to her cheek, and sniffles into the fingers that she used to kiss and nuzzle like any good mother. "It's not that kind of love, Kol."

"So? It's still love. And it won't just up and leave, like the worst of your suitors. Or die. I'm not Nik, Bekah. I won't make it contingent upon whether your obey me. You can even pick where we go first."

"It's been too long since you've loved someone like that, if you think it's the same."

"But why would I?" he asks hoarsely. "We're the only things that last, Bekah."

And when he says, "Please?" in his little boy's voice, she knows.

And she takes his arms gently from around her, and turns round to brush the hair from his eyes, and run her thumb over the dimple in his chin, and order him not unkindly to his own bed.

* * *

She doesn't invite him back to hers.

He stretches out his visit for another two weeks, but he knows its time to let the years apply their salve, so all grown-up in the coat he first wore to town, he stands on Laindon's platform with the train puffing away in the background and the passengers dinging their luggage on the steps of the carriages, and tells her good-bye with his usual smile on his face.

"Don't eat any peasants." She straightens his collar. "And make sure Nik gets rid of his horrid beard." She smoothes the shoulders of his coat. "And  _don't_ grow yours back."

"Of course, Mother," he says, with a smile that earns him a little slap to the face for his impertinence.

"And don't sleep with any girls prettier than me."

He bows over her hand, and kisses it.

"Of course not. That would be impossible anyway, Bekah. You know you're unequaled." From under his lashes, he gives her his devilish look, and the wiggle of the eyebrows that's coaxed more than a few innocents to bed, and she pats him on the head with her sunniest smile.

"I know. I just wanted to hear you say it."

He holds out his arms to either side. "Well, I don't have any ground rules to lay down. Don't do anything I wouldn't do. Which means the world is yours, Bekah," he says, and tweaks the end of her nose. "I'll check in on you in a few decades or so."

He half-turns to board the train.

"Kol. Wait, please," she says, and if she couldn't feel this sudden crumpling of her face, she'd see the collapse of it on his own.

She throws herself against him, and clutches him for a very long time, just pressing her face to his shoulder, and inhaling everything she wants to remember, the faint whiff of old death in his coat and the cologne he's lightly spritzed into the hollow of his throat, so that he smells of blood and citrus.

Her favorite.

"Be careful, you idiot."

"Be happy," he replies, and vanishes onto the train.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Rebekah's murders and mutilations of the prostitutes are taken directly from the Jack the Ripper case, and are actually, for once, not just spawned from my own sick and twisted mind. Isn't history just super?
> 
> The media referred to Jack most commonly as The Whitechapel Killer or sometimes Leather Apron, following stories from prostitutes of a creepy and violent man in a leather apron who would stalk and harass them. This is why he (or rather, she, in this story) is referred to at one point in the flashback as Leather Apron. The media swiped the name Jack the Ripper from some letters which were sent to news agencies by an anonymous source who claimed to be Jack the Ripper. This quote: 'I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red thread is fit enough I hope ha ha' has been taken directly from part of the 'Dear Boss' letter, the only difference being that I have changed red ink to red thread. This was the first letter to introduce the now-infamous Jack the Ripper moniker.
> 
> 'Indecent liberties' was the official charge men caught engaging in homosexual activity were brought up on, and yes, they were indeed imprisoned for this particular 'crime'. You could ask Oscar Wilde about that, except he's, you know, dead, having met his end sickly and in exile after serving prison time for this very offense.
> 
> Thanks for reading, please don't judge me too harshly for the sibling sexytimes, and I'll be back in a few days with the next part of this.


	4. Part Four

**New Orleans, 2014**

Klaus loosens gradually.

And it's her.

It's  _her_.

She never thought she'd get to say that.

But it's not Elijah's bright and shining face he has to look away from, to smother the little smile at the edges of his lips, and when she crowds him in his office, pressing them both hip to hip in front of that filing cabinet, he's all schoolboy, and it's his first crush, Number One Dork, says so on his name badge, Caroline Forbes Is the Way and the Life, take a freaking number for this line, he revered her first.

Oh, she forgot how much she likes his laugh.

And when Mr. One Step almost falls off his chair because Caroline is being Caroline, he finds it endearing, he finds it hilarious, he has to lay his cheek down on his desk and bawl until he's cried out all his mirth-

She feels it in her own belly.

And she thinks, if she could touch his curls, and take all her breaths from his lips.

And that's silly of her.

That's Caroline the Girl, that's Caroline the Mortal, that's Caroline the Wendy Darling of the story, who at the end of the day flew back to her own window and laid down in her own bed and woke up one day older and maybe felt the slightest thump of her disappointment, to understand she could have held onto it, that day before, she could have stretched it so far.

She had so many love stories, that Caroline.

But that's human conceit.

To think: somewhere somehow someone will take me forever.

That's such a short while, that's a blink, that's the fall of one empire and the rise of another.

And he has been there done that, and it never lasted.

But he's happy.

She wonders: is anyone that old ever really happy, but he is.

Just looking up at her like she's something he will always orbit.

And isn't that too a human conceit, happiness, after two centuries, three, four, doesn't the novelty wear off, haven't you seen too much, isn't it all just death, as far as the eye can see, others getting too much of it and you never having enough, and all man and civilization just crumbling away at the edges, and always standing impervious you with your unchanged freaking  _everything_?

But he's happy.

It might not go on forever.

But it does go on.

So maybe-

So maybe.

But anyway you know something- she will touch his curls, she will watch him freeze when she does it, and forget exactly how to breathe, and forget still more that he doesn't even need to, she will sit herself on the edge of his desk with her legs crossed and watch him actually look at her face, the weirdo -because O-M-G this shirt? She'd motorboat herself, thank you very much- and tap his pen nervously on his papers and pretend like he's smooth as glass with his annoying jerk dimples.

"Mark Dalton?" she asks, flashing across to the filing cabinet.

He puts his feet up on his desk with that I-am-everything smirk. "You can x our friend Mark off the list, sweetheart."

She flips open a file, and turns back to him with her best eyelash flutter. "I'm not even going to ask about Devon Kierson. I took care of that myself."

His smile just spreads, and spreads. "Well, well, Caroline."

"Ok, well, he tried to do it to me first!"

"Really," Klaus says in the most dangerous of all his murdery voices, and drops his smile.

"Well, it's not like you can rake him literally over the coals for it now, so untwist your panties. And did you see they put off Mardi Gras again, because of all the violence? Ok, I can  _not_ be in New Orleans and not get a Mardi Gras." She looks pointedly at him.

"I'm sensing this is somehow my responsibility?"

"Well, it is kind of your fault that they're putting it off. Soooo…maybe you could let me borrow your house for a masked ball?"

His smile is back. "I could consider that."

"Great, because I kinda' already called that catering place I used for the party where you killed the hunters? And also maybe the florists? Oh, and I already bought my Mardi Gras mask."

"And who are you going to invite, love, Stefan?"

"I kinda' maybe  _sort of_ …already compelled some guests to show up here next week on the 15th, in formal wear and masks. Ok, it's not wrong! Like, they're going to have a great time." She points sternly at him. "Do  _not_ eat them."

He spreads his hands. "I wouldn't dream of it, sweetheart."

"Well you better not. Or else."

He raises one eyebrow.

She mimics him with her own.

And he smiles, whether he wants to or not.

She tosses him the file in her hand, and screams. "Oh my God- catch that!" she shrieks, flapping her hands as he plucks it from the air with this little flicker underneath his stubble that she knows is amusement. "Oh my God, we were just doing this little banter thing, and I went with it, I didn't know what I was doing, I just- is it ok? Did you drop any of the pages?  _Don't hold it like that_ \- do you know how long I spent organizing all those papers?!"

He's laughing again.

"You are not. Funny," she says tightly.

* * *

She is reading in whatever the hell rich people speak for 'living room' is when Elijah glides past in his flawless suit and his mirror-bright shoes and double-takes so hard he nearly breaks his neck.

She can see Klaus burying his chin in his palm to hide his smile, like he knows what's coming, like he knows precisely why she is being perused with all the narrow-eyed judgment of someone caught wearing her stripes both vertical and horizontal, and if he wouldn't mind -she's  _sweating_ here,  _jerk_ \- maybe he could cut in with some reassuring clarification on Big Brother's squinty constipation eyes, ok, and all the meticulously rolled-sleeve Armani murder it so totally does not herald-

Elijah snatches  _Message In a Bottle_ from her hand and she jumps.

"No," he says, and vanishes.

He returns a moment later with a copy of Sophocles'  _Oedipus Rex_ and hands it to her.

"Niklaus, we've talked about this. I've tolerated much from you over these long centuries, but my patience is not endless, brother." He fixes his sleeve cuff almost roughly. "And Caroline. A tragedy should not gain such a label from the various atrocities the 'author' commits against his native language."

"Ooookay," she ventures cautiously. "Sorry?"

"I've disposed of it properly. I ask that you not allow this to happen again."

"He means he's burned it, by the way, love," Klaus cuts in, still smiling down onto the book he has open across his own lap.

" _What_?" she screeches. "You  _burned_ my book? You can't just go around burning my books! Oh my God, what kind of love-hating fascist  _Nazis_ are you people?"

"The kind who prefer their literature destined for greater things than the toilet paper dispensers of public restrooms."

Elijah adjusts his cuffs and disappears.

She shoots her incredulous gaze across the room to Klaus, sprawled all over his damn chair with his usual look-at-how-much-casually-better-I-am-at-everything-than-everyone-else indolence, his smirk no longer hidden, his book forgotten in his lap. "Oh my God, what a  _snob_!"

"Ah, yes, sweetheart, I should have mentioned it to you earlier- Elijah had a bit of a chat with me about some of your reading habits."

"What the hell is  _that_ supposed to mean? I'm not exactly illiterate. I read  _Moby Dick_ in school.  _And_ 'The Remembrance of Things Past',  _all_ of it, which like  _one_ percent of high school students have actually read, so where he gets off freaking  _judging_ me like I'm some kind of drooling teenybopper who says 'OMG, that would totes be the Justin Bieber biography!' any time someone asks me what my favorite book is, I couldn't even tell you, and by the way? That suit doesn't sit quite right on his shoulders.  _And I know you heard that_!" she hollers toward the stairs.

"He heard it without the screaming, love." Klaus spreads his hands. "He only asks that you refrain from…let's see if I can remember this exactly…'Besmirching the sanctity of his hallowed intellectualism, which for a thousand years he has honed on the avoidance of precisely the kind of pedestrian filth the tasteless publishing houses peddle to this semi-literate buffoonery it has the audacity to consider a worthy audience.'"

"Wow," she says flatly. "Do you know you're all nuts?"

He folds his hands in his lap and gives her the best of his dimples. "Just keenly aware of our superiority, love."

She rolls her eyes, and roughly flips open the book in her hand. "Is this in Greek? How does he expect me to broaden my feeble plebeian mind when I can't even read it?" she snaps.

He tilts his head, steepling his fingers in front of his nose.

"Would you like to learn?"

He is so endearingly eager, this all-powerful dork with his crush on his sleeve.

So she says 'Fine', and she tamps down on her smile when he sits too close, and he is sure with each pass of his fingers from one page to the next to brush her own, to linger like he doesn't notice, to light up like that once-a-very-long-time-ago boy must have as she wobbles her way through the first of her verbs and she drops the book to clap.

* * *

So they tiptoe around each other, patching up cracks.

And then one day he is showing her around his studio, and watching her like each miniscule flinch of her eyelid is a fascination, and he says, "Caroline."

He says, " _Caroline_."

And it's like he can't get any farther.

She stands in front of some Russian general or another waiting for him to collect himself, and she wouldn't believe he could breathe like this, a man like this.

He sounds like he's drowning.

But then she thinks about the way he looks at her, and maybe he is.

She's never been that catastrophic before.

"If I were…if I were to…if I wanted to…" He licks his lips, and steps up beside her, his hands behind his back, neither of them looking at one another, this some Russian general or another peering out in all his infinite wisdom, frozen as he is in his cadmium centuries.

"If I wanted to just trust you, against all my instincts," he says, and pauses again. "Could I do that? Would you say…would you say I wouldn't regret it?"

She blinks.

She turns to look at him, and he flicks his eyes sideways toward her, so terrified, and she thinks, she thinks-

She could ruin him.

Right in this very moment.

It's not the white oak stake.

It's not the white oak stake at all.

It's her.

And Mommy,  _Mommy_ \- she looks at him and she wants to know if she held him by the neck, and she forced him to his knees, would he bow his head- would he prostrate himself before little Caroline Forbes, who has always needed to crawl for all her love, and so now you know, now you know, your little girl is dead.

But she wasn't a very good girl.

And she hated herself so much, Mommy.

Giving up all the best bits of herself, and handing them out so freely and happily to everyone else.

But she never would have stood here, she never would have  _stood here_ , Mom, and thought, yes, yes I deserve this, yes it makes sense, yes I don't blame him.

"This is about Tyler, isn't it?" she asks quietly, and he takes a deep breath and looks away from her.

"I know you've been sneaking round town with him."

"So you've been sitting here thinking that I might be sleeping with Tyler behind your back, and I'm still alive, and Tyler's still alive, and you're prepared to take me at my word, despite all your paranoid freakazoid tendencies, if I tell you that you can trust me?"

He looks at her like she's stabbed him, but he says, "Yes", so quietly.

"So what would you do if I told you that what I wanted, what I really,  _really_  wanted, what would make me just so  _happy_ , was to leave town with him, and go anywhere else, and leave behind everything here, forget it all ever happened, and just have my small-town boy for the rest of my eternal life?"

"You'd grow tired of it, love- you're still hung up on human trivialities. That's all Tyler is for you. Just one less tenuous connection to-"

"But what if that's what I want? What if that's what would make me happy?" she interrupts. "Would you rip my head off? Lock me away? Kill Tyler?"

He looks back at her until he blinks first.

"No," he says miserably.

"So that's why I chose right, when Tyler wanted me to spy on you for him and his pack, and I said no. All eight times he asked me; God, he never could take a clue."

He looks so completely wrecked that she tilts herself forward, and she leans her forehead against his, and she lifts one hand to run it tentatively through the curls at the nape of his neck, trying not to wonder, is she breathing like him, so jaggedly, all the rooms in all this house with the windows left open to let the world in, and not enough oxygen for either of them?

"I did try," he whispers. "I went to Sophie, and I was going to rip out her heart, because I couldn't- because I couldn't look at you when I did it, and I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Caroline." He lets out a shaky breath, and turns his face into the hand she has set on his cheek.

"Ok, well, I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier, but I was afraid you'd kill him. But let's just put it out there that my sorry is waaaay less necessary than yours, and that I'm only saying it because I'm a good person, and that's what you do when you have a misunderstanding that hurt the other person, instead of trying to  _murder_ them. Seriously, what is  _wrong_ with you, Charles Manson?"

He doesn't laugh, he just nods, and if he could just show one infinitesimal iota of this same regret she knows he feels for this brother he has lost, maybe he could have him back.

"I won't do the cliché 'but why didn't you' thing, because I know." She grabs his face in both hands, and makes him look at her. "And I know you won't even  _think_ about it again." She rolls her eyes. "Ok, I'm sure you'll think about it again, because murder crosses your mind more than, like, my boobs in that super fabulous shirt I was wearing the other day, but you won't  _ever_ give me a reason to be afraid of you, or to wonder if I'm screwed anytime I cross whatever… _insane_ , megalomaniac douchemonger I-am-the-powers-that-be-hear-my-demands line you happen to draw in the sand."

"No," he breathes.

"And for all the gazillion times I'm going to hurt your feelings over the centuries, because that's what you do to the people you love, you know exactly where to hit, and it's where you put  _everything_ , when you're lashing out, I am sorry. And you're going to accept my apologies. And you're not going to stab me, or bite me, or hold any of the people I care about over my head, because you can't deal with your feelings like an adult instead of a wounded little… _man-child_ who takes everything so hard, who thinks that he is such a shitty, shitty man that no one will ever come to him of their own free will, even though they do, even though they want to, so  _much_ , and they love him and they look up to him. Whether he thinks they should or not. They just do."

He looks down so that she can't see his eyes, just the long blonde-tipped lashes, his breath moving across her palm, and his lips following soon after.

She lets the moment linger on for a while between them, hoping, God, just let his stupid jerk ass think about this, really turn it over inside his mind, and examine it from every angle, as he treats all his best machinations.

"By the way, you know Gaiden Markerson's been plotting against you, and slowly manipulating some of the others in place at the Pelham to join up with him?" she asks finally.

He does look up now. "I'm aware, love."

She hesitates for just a moment, and then she takes her hands from his face and her forehead from his own, and she places the distance of business between them, crossing her arms. "Well, we should probably do something about that, shouldn't we?" she asks, and watches his dimples just grow, and grow.

* * *

He's always liked the Pelham.

Its proprietor he's somewhat less fondness for, but can't all get along now, can we, mate, shame about that.

And he just trying so hard to patch this little community together, and link them all shoulder to shoulder against this great and eternal might of human resistance.

He thinks his feelings might be a touch hurt.

Yes, he's quite sure.

Bit of a softy: you'll have to excuse him.

He flings open the doors of the Pelham hard enough to chip the walls to either side of them.

Gaiden Markerson is leaning against the front desk with that casual slouch of the quietly conceited, talking to some lad who has his back to the entrance, and now they both look up at the clamor of his arrival, and Gaiden blanches, of course he does, what an insult it would be, to receive not so much as a flicker of the lash, but he'll give the boy credit for his steadiness of hand.

He links his hands behind his back and smiles. "I hear you've been doing a bit of recruiting."

The boy blinks. "Of course. I've been out rounding up some candidates; can never have too many eyes out there, with all these soldiers hanging around, right? I was just about to let you know, actually."

He tilts his head, and lets his smile spread. "That's the first lie you've told me, mate."

The lad whose name he doesn't know shifts nervously on his feet.

Gaiden blinks again, and darts a look at this anonymous fellow, smoothing one hand across the counter into which he has angled his hip.

Poor lad.

Young thing; year at most, and no stomach for work such as this, and so he breaks away from Gaiden, and he darts toward the door, and with a little twitch of his shoulder to clear his path to the exit, he lets the boy pass him right by.

Caroline steps inside, and the boy draws up short.

And he sizes her up, his broad shoulders and his fifty extra pounds to her slender waist, and her pretty little hands, and the shine of her cosmetics with all their bright and lustrous glow, and he thinks, as all man will, it's only a bit of girl.

She grabs him by the throat as he tries to elbow his way past, and through the air he soars, across the floor he slides, his jacket shushing against the tiles.

She pins him with one long black heel through his throat.

"Gaiden. You remember Caroline, of course?" he asks, extending his hand toward her, and bowing just slightly, to announce her as every queen must be paid her respects.

He gives the boy the last smile he will ever see.

Tch, tch.

He takes back what he said about the steadiness of those hands.

What a  _scream_ , mate.

* * *

Three days later Rebekah marches into one of the guest rooms where she is poking around, and throws a heap of black material into her arms. "Here. Go and get your measurements at that tailor's down the road, and have them take this in for you. It's one of Nik's suits. We're going to a drag show tomorrow night."

"What?"

"Did I stutter, Caroline? I said, go get Nik's suit tailored so you're not swimming in it. I'm not going anywhere with you if you have ratty hair  _and_ ill-fitting clothes."

"Why the hell would I wear Klaus' suit?" she demands, disentangling the jacket from the pants and holding it up with a frown. "I'm sure it looks really nice on him, but it's not exactly my style."

"I said we're going to a drag show and we're getting into the spirit of things. Men's clothes aren't as pretty, but they do have a certain freedom to them. You can come and pick out a hat afterward; there must be one from every century scattered throughout this place.  _Don't_ tell Nik what you're up to."

"Why? Because he's so sensitive and prudish and you don't want to scandalize him?"

Rebekah crosses her arms, and she watches her very carefully school her face to blankness. "Because it's the kind of thing Kol would show up at."

* * *

Elijah nearly swoons when he catches her straightening his brother's suit in front of the full-length mirror at the end of Klaus' bed (perv), cocking her head to either side as she smoothes the lay of it across her shoulders, and down over her hips, and gives one final tweak to the cuffs with her brightest smile, because maybe she's not going to dude it up on the regular, but she looks pretty freaking fabulous, if she says so herself, with her curls brushed to gold, and her makeup just lightly enhancing, her lashes subtly curled, her lips faintly tinted.

She glances up when he pauses in the doorway with his fist to his mouth. "Caroline," he rasps hoarsely, and he whips his free hand through a motion she can hardly follow, but she thinks-

Did he just cross himself?

"What have you  _done_?"

"What?" she asks as Rebekah appears in the doorway, rudely shoving her brother right out of the way.

"Are you ready?" Rebekah demands. "Elijah, what are you standing there gawping for?"

He points tensely. "Did you do that, sister?"

"What, the suit? No, she had it altered at that place down the road."

He disappears.

In a blink he is back, measuring tape in hand, and before she can blurt out a protest, he has whipped himself all around her, lifting her arms to roll the tape deftly across the entire span of them, looping it around her chest, her hips, and up the inseam, and then suddenly the jacket is gone, the collar of her dress shirt carefully straightened.

"I won't ask what the two of you are up to; that's not what's important at the moment. Caroline, I'll afford you the courtesy of the modesty Niklaus' bathroom presents; please remove the pants in there, and hand them out through the door."

"Fine, Elijah, but make it quick."

He gives Rebekah the bitchiest look she has ever seen. "These things cannot be timed, Rebekah."

"Well I'm not sitting round here all night to indulge your little insanities, Elijah."

"Ok, you know what, just take them- Klaus' shirt is long enough for me to just change right here," she says, and quickly slips out of her pants, tugging the hem of her top down to make sure it conceals everything vital, and tossing the pants to Elijah.

He zips away into the hall and down the stairs.

She glances over at Rebekah. "I'm starting to think Klaus is the normal one in this family."

* * *

Widest eyes he ever saw on a poor fucked fucker, he thinks, twirling his unlit fag round his fingers, and watching the stage fire up its first blue circle, with the barber's chair in its center, and the lad astride it, and all the audience gone wild for the towering she-man who steps into this spotlight with his lips saucily puckered, and his hip jauntily jutting.

He steps out from behind the chair to give everyone a good look-see at the duds, twirling in his gown of red velvet with the puffed sleeves and the square neckline, his elbows modestly covered in darker red, and dressed up round the wrists with spurts of lace.

"Elizabeth Bathory!" Kol yells, and a point and a round of applause for his ebullient friend here, and down to business the man gets, priming the pipes with a couple of throat clears, and then launching into a version of The Ballad of Sweeney Todd reaches right down and rips the guts out of you, it does, all the lonesome ache of it. None of the eerie wail of the original that used to tiptoe the spiders right down his neck, but something God-sent, from the mouths of cherubs to the ears of monsters, and him with the smile just glued to his dumbstruck gom face.

And then onto the stage tap dances a man in his too-large suit, with his top hat and his cane, clicking his way across the boards as the winsome Elizabeth drops his voice, and a grip of his lads and a shake of his hips and now every line somehow an innuendo, with the notes in just the right places, and the eyebrow wiggles to help along the slowest of the boyos sitting round them.

"Jack the Ripper!" Kol calls out, and supplies himself with his own round of applause this time. He leans across the table. "That was my sister. I don't like to brag about it."

"Right; I know you're not a man given to- ay!" he snaps. "The fuck do you think you're doin'?" he demands, glancing away from the stage to catch the little shit rattling away over the top of his drink with a sugar packet.

"I already ruined mine; I put too much in it. Here, you can have it," Kol says, and shoves his own glass of A positive across the table.

"I don't want it. I want you to keep your fuckin' paws off me own. Ain't me fault you're a real fuckin' quare hawk what puts sugar in everything that goes in his mouth."

"Not everything," Kol replies, and fondles him under the table.

He nudges him away with a little smile.

The lad in the barber's chair tries to make a leap for it, poor gom.

Backhand to the fine young cheek and oh he flies, with the men in all their red-lipped glory and towering heels and the wigs of wispy gold queuing up for their chorus line, and shaking what the good Lord gave them like it's to be peddled from the street corners.

"Lavinia Fisher; Amelia Dyer; Aileen Wuornos; Jane Toppan; Ida Schnell," Kol yells toward the stage, pointing toward each of them as he hollers over the cheering of the patrons. "If I get more of them right than anyone else, I get to go up on stage."

"Excellent!" Elizabeth calls out, and flourishes a straight blade from his skirts, holding a hand over his mouth and giving a wink to the audience. "And what's your name, honey?" he yells across the room to Kol.

His fellow performers fan out behind him into their can-can line to the great mirth of the crowd that shakes the rafters with its delight, the whole long column of them turning, turning, and still snapping out those legs in perfect synchronization, and catching the lad in the gut as he makes a mad scramble for it.

"You see, this is what comes from having been dead for nearly a century. He never would have asked Nik for his name," Kol laments.

"Let's bring our little lady slaying expert up here! Give him a nice round of applause, gents!" Elizabeth calls out to the crowd, waving his straight razor merrily, and waggling all the wobbling monstrosity of his stuffed tits at Kol as he bows his way toward the stage, parade waving the crowd to a new frenzy, and obliging the shrieks for a gawp at all his smooth and youthful centuries with a lift of his shirt.

Into his hand with the straight razor and now the chorus line breaks up and regroups behind the chair and swings it round toward the audience and his bloody peacock of a friend, just strutting his way through his temporary fame, and letting the front-rowers get in their snatches, the grabby motherfucking cunt sores.

"I'd like to dedicate this murder to a good friend of mine," Kol announces as that chorus line flares out, and breaks into their choreographed shuffles, closing in round the chair so you can hardly get a peep at the lad, and then spinning and whirling away to the very edges of that hot blue spotlight, so there's the lad in the middle, silent as a mute, and the fear in all its warm vulnerability down his cheeks, and his friend at the forefront, gesturing theatrically with his razor. "It's his birthday next week. Happy early 123rd, Tim," he says, and slits the boy's throat all the way through to his spine.

The performers clap.

Some unkempt fucker with his wee diseased asshole playing the part of his face lets loose a shrill whistle, and a swipe for Kol's ballocks and a suggestion of where he can drape them, and he's out of his chair.

He puts the unlit fag in his mouth and saunters along with his hands in his pockets, the hat pulled low on his eyebrows, and all the menace of his long and lonesome years blowing men into their graves high in his maidenly cheeks, he hopes.

He stops beside the man and ticks the fag to the other side of his mouth.

Kol twirls the lad's head over his own and lets it fly.

The crowd lets out a great cheer.

And now into the chorus line with him, his arms round the waists of Jack and Jane, and his leg keeping time just fucking grand, the precocious fucker.

Elizabeth Bathory slips a sleeve low on his shoulder with a coquettish flutter of his lashes.

"I'm going to fuck him until his little asshole bleeds," the man with his smashed arsehole of a face declares, pointing at Kol.

"Hey," he says quietly, switching the fag once more. "He's taken already, lad. So let's just leave off, all right?"

The man twists round to give him a slow incredulous sweep of his eyes. "Oh, yeah, sure, you little flaccid bottom faggot. Fuck off, and leave the men to it."

Elizabeth rips the top of his gown and spills his tits everywhere, gathering up armfuls of the blood bags on their way to the floor, and tossing them like confetti to the crowd.

He tongues the fag to the other side of his mouth.

Kol faces off against Jack, Jack's top hat on his head, the cane sailing back and forth between them as they jive face to face, Jack giving a leap onto the chair with the lad still limply slumped in it, and his friend dancing himself over to the back of it, and both of them giving their all as they tap tap tap their way round the stage.

He picks up the man's beer bottle.

"I said fuck off, before I snap your queer little ass over my knee, and then fuck your boyfriend unconscious and come all over your cunt fucking face."

Tap of the neck on the edge of the table and into the fucker's eye with the shorn rim and its wet and bristling spikes, all the way forward, tipping the bottle as he goes, till he hears the slosh of the last little dregs kicking round at the bottom hit the man's eye, and ends the lad's scream with the edge of the table, heaving him by the neck hairs up down, down up, till he's not a tooth to spit.

He heaves him up onto the stage.

Jack backflips off the chair, and sticks his landing with the cane through the man's heart.

He yanks the cane topside, the heart all aglisten on its tip.

Kol crouches at the edge of the stage with a smile. "Green's a good color on you, darling," he says, and tweaks his nose.

"Is this your friend with the birthday?" Elizabeth asks, gown limp round his waist, and his hands pat patting his little wig back into place. "Bring him on up here!"

"Ah, no, I'll just be taking me seat again-"

"Nonsense!" Elizabeth crows, and before retreat's a mere twinkle in his eye, he's a hand in each armpit, and half the chorus line hauling him up onto the stage, Kol tipping the corpse from the seat to clear a spot for him as his struggles unseat his cap and his fag and not much else, all the boys with their gargantuan lashes and the wide and shining Os of their jester's mouths tossing him with their vast approval roar into the chair.

"He's a bit bashful," Kol explains, twirling the cap he's saved from the floor round his hand, and up into the air he sails it, so that he may catch it on his own head.

"In that case," Elizabeth says, and claps twice.

A real blinder of a second spotlight straight into his fecking eyes, and from the piano in the corner now the first tinkling notes of "Happy Birthday", and now front and center with the lad in his suit and long blonde wig, top hat back on his head, and Kol, the right fucking shit, handing off the cane so that it may be looped round his neck, and a slapstick yoink of a pull to put him nearly nose to nose with aul Jack, who plants a dripping smacker on his lips.

He feels his cheeks go red all the way to his ears.

"Happy birthday to you," Jack belts out in his sultriest baritone, and whips off the jacket.

"Oh fuck. Oh Jesus," he says, and slinks down in his chair to pop a hand up over his eyes.

Jack snaps his suspenders.

"You're going to go to sleep sooner or later, you absolute fucking shiteheap."

Kol gives his most unrepentant smile, and leans in to grab Jack by his tongue as it darts out to lick he knows not what, half his shirt undone, and the trouser fly flapping in the wind, so he gets a peep of the scrubbed and shining pink underneath.

"Ah, ah, ah, darling; be careful where you put that."

So in goes the tongue and another pink flopper lolled out in place of it, the trousers down round his ankles now and the shirt billowing out dramatically as he shakes the lads to great roars of appreciation, and skims the shirt down his arms in time to his final verse.

Kol holds his hat in front of the man's crotch. "Is that better?"

"Would you get that the fuck out of there? It's got to go back on me head, you fucker!"

Jack hits his final note, a real glass-breaker, it is, and on its feet with the crowd now, and Jack just glowing and glowing as he takes his bows, and blows his kisses.

Kol sets his cap back on his head, smirking all the while.

"I'd punch your fucking mug, if you couldn't dodge it before I'd even got the thought planted in me head."

"You like my mug too much," Kol says, leaning in with his hands on either arm of the chair, and pressing his head back into the spine of the chair with a long kiss that mutes the crowd, mutes the bloody piano with its long and torturous jingling of those old ivory teeth, wraps his poor old head in the snap crackle and pop of that bloodsmog blinkers his ears to everything but the roar of it as Kol grabs his prick hard enough to get the old boy's attention.

"You want a bigger audience than usual?" Kol asks, biting his ear lobe.

"What- in front of all of them?" he replies breathlessly.

"It's not exactly the first time someone's watched."

"There's never been a good fifty of them, and we've always eaten them afterwards, so I won't be bumping into them round town, and realizing oh, yeah, the granny there with her hand round her little granddaughter's wee pinky has seen me bare-assed and balls-deep. Hope she didn't see me 'O face'. Looks like a bloody donkey mid-yawn."

Kol kneels in front of him, smiling. "Are you sure?" he asks, sliding one hand up his thigh.

And, oh, the leap of his blood, and the draining of it from all the places he needs it most, with the little whirling cells to tell him Christ on a cross, Timothy Patrick, and what would the Ma be sayin' then?

"No," he moans, and tips his head back against the chair and unbuttons his trousers himself.

Oh good Christ, it curls his toes, the lapping of that warm and learned tongue round the head of him, and all down the shaft.

* * *

The little twit twirls her hat on the knob of her cane all the way to the bar, beaming at everyone.

She'd like to hold onto her scowl, and look down her nose at the girl, but she's so young.

Nothing yet rubbed off the world.

She used to be like that.

The sky was one long marvel, and the stars miracles, and if her brothers made gnats of themselves, still they were like gods, each and every one of them, strong and broad-shouldered and with the monsters tucked under their arms and not inside their breasts.

She holds the door open for Caroline, smoothing one of her curls as she passes, and flicking it back into the long and gleaming formation of them hanging perfectly down the girl's back.

"Oh my God- there are people doing it on stage!" Caroline blurts out as she shuts the door behind them, and takes one long breath of blood and beer.

She grabs the girl's wrist roughly, and yanks her toward one of the very farthest tables, just at the fringe of the crowd, and tables and tables from where her brother will be lurking, near the front, where he can integrate himself into anything he sees fit to join. "This isn't your Cousin Mary Sue's fifth birthday party, Caroline. Keep your voice down. I don't want my brother to spot us, if he's here."

Caroline huffs as she pulls out a chair. "Why don't you just talk to him? Sometimes people do that, when they love each other. But noooo. Instead we're going to sit here in the back, lurking like creepers, and oh my  _God_  that's Tim and Kol! What is Tim doing to him?!"

She flicks a glance toward the couple in the barber's chair, the one with a belt round his neck, and his partner hovering over his lap, and holding it tight, so the cords in her brother's neck have to strain for each inhale, Kol's eyes fluttering in barely-conscious pleasure, and his hips canted up into the grip of his pretty-lashed little boyfriend, who has one hand down the front of his trousers.

"Don't get your panties in a twist, Caroline; he likes that."

"He likes what?! Being murdered while he gets a hand job?!"

"Some men like it when you strangle them during sex. It makes their orgasm more powerful, apparently."

"Have you done that before?" Caroline asks, trying not to look, and slipping in her glances from beneath her lashes, and the hat she has at last relegated to her head, cane across her knees.

She smiles. "Only afterward."

When her brother comes, the bar cheers.

He's perfectly unashamed, of course, but when the Irish twit has come back down to earth, he pulls his hat lower, and hunches those broad shoulders, and tries to make of his 6' 3" frame something petite as her own perfect waist.

But he's smiling, which is more than she can say for herself.

She'd like to pull it right off his face.

And those eyes, while she's at it, with their pretty, pretty lashes, darkened by nothing but Nature's own rare and discerning hand, yes, those would look much better under her shiny new dress heels, with the toes polished to Elijah's stern and exacting standards.

She watches them snatch a couple of glasses from an empty table, and drink sitting shoulder to shoulder, facing the stage.

She bores her eyes into the back of Kol's head, and shoots her best glare at Tim's hand when it crawls out with all the audacity of one whose fingers are actually fit to touch the sanctity of these Original superiors, and closes round her brother's knee.

"Ok, let me see if I've got this boy thing down," Caroline says.

She keeps her eyes on her brother.

Caroline kicks her shin. "I meant  _look_ , Rebekah!" she demands, and then as she whips round to put the girl's eyes out with her nails, Caroline drops her voice, and slouches in her chair, her knees wide, one hand down her pants, and the free one curled toward her head, so her bicep stands out beneath the sleeve of Nik's jacket, the top hat cocked at a rakish angle.

"Hey baby," she says in her deepest imitation. "You come here often?"

"You're ridiculous," she replies, trying not to smile.

"But you're smiling."

"I am not."

"Ok, whatever. Seriously, though, how long are we going to sit here? I feel creepy. Especially after watching your brother just get his weird murder…wanking. Now how am I supposed to look either one of them in the eye?"

"I don't doubt you'll get over it quickly. Probably the moment you need one of them to do something for you."

"What would I need one of them to do for me?"

"I don't know, Caroline. Hang gaudy Easter decorations? Hand dye all those eggs you bought, and hide them round the house, and sit quietly through all your complaining when they forget where they put them and nobody gets their little chocolate bunny?"

"Easter was yesterday, and nobody hid the eggs anywhere, because somebody broke all of them." The girl thins her lips, and glares across the table.

"Don't look at me- it was probably Nik. He bitched for ages about the indignity of someone of his reputation being expected to Easter egg hunt like some sort of doe-eyed Kindergartner who eats paste during his lunch breaks and has to be rescued from the lefty scissors."

She feels a gust of air against her back.

"I spy with my little eye a bitch," her brother says in her ear.

Caroline takes off her hat, and sets it carefully in her lap, smoothing her hands across its top.

She swivels slowly in her chair, and sweeps him her loftiest head to toe, till she's withered the Irish boy with it, it's that powerful.

He taps a cigarette nervously from the packet he delves from his pocket, and lights the tip of it, remembering to keep the smoke well away from her face, and giving a nod to Caroline as he sticks his free hand in his pocket and click clacks all the anxiety from his fingertips with that pocket watch he's carried since he was a mere ward in Nik's carefully detrimental custody.

"Oh, it's you. That's unfortunate," she says, turning casually away from him, and lacing her hands prettily in her lap.

Kol sits down right on their table, and leans in until she can't ignore him anymore. "Did you have something you wanted to say to me, Bekah, or are you just here to bask silently in the delightful company? You must not get much of that at home."

"Caroline and I are having a girls' night out. You just happened to be an unfortunate snag in it, so if you don't mind, why don't you take your little boyfriend elsewhere? This is my bar now."

Kol loosens the tie at her throat, and whips it from around her neck.

She makes a grab for it.

He holds out his hand and gives a short whistle, wriggling his fingers.

Tim tosses his lighter over her head.

Kol flicks it open and sets flame to the end of the tie.

"Kol!" she bellows, blurring for the hand he hasn't kept out of her reach, and bending the pointer finger till it snaps. "That's Nik's!"

"I'm aware. Why don't you explain to our understanding and kind-hearted big brother what happened to it? I'm sure he'll believe that you, completely by happenstance, bumped into me while out and about on the town, and that of course this wasn't any sort of contrived meeting meant to conspire against him. What kind of paranoid maniac would conjure up a nonsense theory like that anyway?" He smiles, and loops the still-smoldering tie back round her neck, the flame catching hold of a strand of her hair.

She wets pointer and thumb with her tongue, and casually puts it out.

And then she grabs her brother round the neck, and slams him down on the table, pivoting half the bar round to watch this new turn of events as the wood splits underneath him, loud as a gunshot, and sags, and his face goes that delightful shade of purple that's just so very lovely to watch creep and creep, and the victim thrashing round so helplessly, and making their final stretching pleas with those trembling fingertips.

"Whoa whoa whoa now," Tim says, and from the corner of her eye she sees him edging cautiously toward her, the cigarette put out who knows where, both his hands up, like she is some little dog which may be gently talked round, and made to bend her muzzle to his palm of treats, and soothed out of her bristling anger and into man's lap where she ought quietly sit with her complacent head underneath his fingers.

She backhands him halfway across the bar.

He takes down three tables as he flies.

What woman should not seize her moment in her kingdom of men, and hold it in her hand, and wield herself as Zeus brandishes his thunderbolts, with all the great and mighty presence of this deity man of course likens to himself?

So she stands with her brother's throat in her hand, and all the eyes of all these great and powerful creatures eyeing and sizing her, and finding not her narrow waist, her delicate hands, her pale bloom of fragile rose-skin, but something to perch tall on a cloud, and hear the whispers of bent necked-men with their pious hands to the heavens.

"All right, sweetie," one of the men onstage calls down to her from his safe distance. "Let's simmer down. We've got patrols up and down the French Quarter, this time of night. There's no reason to start something that will make them think they need to pop in for a look."

Tim is back on his feet, wiping blood from his mouth.

Caroline stands up slowly. "Rebekah."

She looks down at Kol's red and straining face, and she thinks of it smiling up at her from its blanket, just new to this world and already so inquisitive, and so soft, so soft the poor little thing.

It was all right then, with only their small and human years spread out before them.

But what about Kol, Father, she remembers thinking with his sword stroke through her breast, what about her soft baby brother who hides all the jabs that get through to his heart, and piles them one on top of the other till he can hardly smile round the width of them, what will he possibly do with this, his slow and solitary rebirth on his bed of pine and earth where he has fallen and been left like some pile of dung to be stepped over and flicked aside?

And how long he got to think on them, those cold and frightful hours stumbling through the trees, and calling out for everyone who didn't care enough to come find him.

She stands looking down at his dimming eyes for a long time.

She opens her fingers slowly.

"Guess that's what you get for fucking around with a lady, right?" some man comments from the next table over, and Kol cracks his neck and cranes his head round to give him a smile he'd quail at, if he'd any brains.

"Why don't you keep your nose out of it, if you can?"

"What's that supposed to mean?" the man snaps, setting down his drink.

"He means you must block out the entire sun with that thing," she cuts in. "Now go away. Nobody asked for your input."

"Why don't you keep your nose out of it, you little cunt? I wasn't talking to you in the first place."

There is a blur out of the corner of her eye, and suddenly Tim has the man by the front of his shirt, and has hauled him out of his chair, so they are tensely toe to toe, the man with his terrible beak nearly a match to his height, and twice his width.

"Whoa there, lad. You can't be talking like that to a lady."

"I'll give you two seconds to get your hands off me, and I'll say whatever the hell I want, and your little priss bitch ass can just get the fuck over it."

Kol begins to laugh.

"What's your problem, shithead?"

"Don't talk to my brother like that, or I'll rip your tongue out and strangle you with it," she barks, pushing her chair to the side so she has room to maneuver.

"Ok, why don't we all maybe just calm down-"

"Be quiet Caroline," she interrupts, crossing her arms and cocking one hip out to the side.

"You must be new," Kol says to the man. "Allow me to introduce myself: Kol Mikaelson. And this is my sister Rebekah, and this 'little priss bitch' is my friend Tim." He turns halfway round to sweep his hand in acknowledgement toward Caroline. "And Caroline Forbes, a newcomer like yourself, but rather nasty. She's a biter. Also, if you lay one pinky on her, my brother Nik will spend the next three centuries disemboweling you."

"Any of this supposed to mean a fucking thing to me?"

Kol throws his head back. "Oh, he's very very new!" He hops down off the table. "Let me explain something to you. My sister and I were what haunted your closet while you were still pissing your diaper. And my friend here- well, he's much newer than that, but he had an excellent mentor, let me assure you."

The man rolls his eyes. "Right; well your friend here can take his hands the fuck off me, and then we won't have any problems."

"I'll be letting you go as soon as you apologize," Tim says, using those pretty lashes to full effect, and looking up through them the way he must have learned from Nik. "Come on, now. Just a little dent in your pride, lad. Give her a sorry and you can be on your way."

The man throws a punch instead, a big sweeping haymaker of a blow with all the force of his massive shoulders behind it, and right underneath it Tim ducks, and comes up holding the man's half-full glass.

He dashes it right into that hideous beak, spraying it up into the man's eyes.

Kol tosses the lighter.

Tim sets the man's face on fire.

"And they say chivalry is dead," Kol says.

With a roar, the man's friends all come surging off their chairs and enter the fray already swinging, piling themselves three deep on Tim, and bearing him all the way to the floor with a crunch that's some joint or another caught wrong.

She hears someone scream.

"Please everybody- for Christ's sake-" one of the performers onstage calls out, and then the whole bar is in on it, neighbor setting upon neighbor with fangs and fists and feet.

Kol picks up two of Tim's assailants by the necks of their shirts and cracks their heads together so hard they split.

Tim has rolled himself on top of the remaining man, and straddling his hips he begins to whale away at the man's face, pounding his jaw crooked, and finally off the hinge altogether, while above him her brother keeps two more from landing their blows on his friend, his hand in one chest, and a head butt to reel the other back out of range till he has tossed the heart aside and tugged off the head of the second man like it is some poorly-attached doll's appendage.

And then comes little Caroline across the table with a chair leg in either hand, one of them already bloodied.

She tosses it to Tim.

He drives it down into the man's heart hard enough to splatter the entire black death of it up the leg and onto his forearms.

"Roll up your sleeves, Caroline! Elijah will have a cow after all the work he put into that suit."

Caroline whips off her jacket, loops it round the nearest neck, and jerks it forward with a great heave that cannonballs man and jacket alike off the nearest table, the man's nose exploding in a plume of blood, the jacket sailing safely over the heads of this writhing mass to land itself on their table.

She back somersaults with a gymnast's dexterity over a table, unbuttoning one sleeve as she goes, and kicking out with her foot, so that she catches the chin of the man pursuing her, knocking him right back into Tim, who twirls the chair leg in his hand, and sticks it all the way through the man's head from temple to temple.

Kol fends off three men and takes a blow from a fourth, right to the dimpled chin, his head snapping back in a spray of red, and the shiny white seeds of his teeth blowing heavenward.

She lands a flying kick Nik showed her centuries ago to the sternum of this little peasant, and breaks three of her knuckles on his face.

* * *

Some fucking fuck stomps the chair leg right out of his fucking bastarding hand, so up he comes with an elbow that knocks the bastard's face slantwise, and no mother to love that mug now, boyo.

The crowd builds and builds between himself and Kol, and all the undulations of this struggle pushing himself one way, and his friend the other, the whole writhing mess of it putting its back into it, so that he's only to let himself be carried away toward that stage gone slippery with blood, punching himself a clear path.

And then out of the corner of his eye that wee little flash of blonde, and a double-take and sure and it's Klaus' lady all fang and guts to her chin, breaking men as she goes.

Giving a good show of it, the tiny thing, ballocks of any man he served with in all the messiest wars of his youth, but still she's just a new little one, and taking on five to her one, which is hardly gentlemanly, boys.

He snaps the neck of one, tears out the throat of a second, and hardly a moment to savor this slow syrup of his triumph down the pipes and into the old stomach when the three of them jerk him right off his feet, his legs in the hands of the biggest, and another with his hands under his armpits, so that all his necessarys make a perfect bullseye for the third, who drives a steel-capped toe into his ribs, and a fucker of a hammer swing down onto his sternum.

Sharp crack and touch of the bile to his tongue and then she lamps the one with the grip on his legs a good knockout to the temple with the chair she picks up, really clocking the hatchet-faced cunt of a fucker, and spinning him sideways into a pack of unfriendlies that takes him down to the whole wet pink fundamentals.

His boots hit the floor.

She drives the chair forward into the bastard with the steel-toed boots, hard enough to lodge one of the legs in his neck, and away he yanks with a gurgle, but Mary and Joseph if she doesn't hold on, pushing and pushing with her tiny white hands, till the leg's lodged all the way through to the other side of his neck, and he's too preoccupied with clawing himself to nubs on its splinters to dodge the nut blow she winds up to deliver.

"Good lass!" he crows, and snaps his head back into the nose of the man still holding him from behind.

He bounces the man's forehead off his knee, kicks a good soprano into his scream, flings him away into the crowd.

Caroline head butts a face that comes looming out of the crowd for her, and a dart for his wrist with her fingers and she bends him at the waist and puts the heel of her hand right against his shoulder blade, and round the wrong way she cranks his whole arm, till something gives with a crunch nearly louder than the man's scream.

Through a little gap he spies the sister sitting almost primly on one of the tables, her legs neatly crossed, and then up pops a head just at shoe height, and she swings with all her might into his jaw, and down for the count with the fellow.

Kol scrambles up from the floor, his hair disheveled, shirt soaked clean through to the skin, and all the wild joy of the fight in his face as he swings out with some length of wood he's got his hands on, battering some poor fucker's head right off his shoulders, so that it hangs down by the last fraying strands of the neck, showing the moist pink circuitry of the veins still pulsing all their feeble lifeblood.

Caroline gets a knock to the temple that puts her on one knee, and he turns with his pistol in his hand now to thump the lad a good butt stroke to the fangs and leave the boy choking on them.

"Oh, Timothy!" Kol sings out, rearranging some finely-made lad's face with his improvised bat. "Time to go!"

"I hear them!"

"What?" Caroline asks, and then round her neck goes an arm, and she bites it till the man swears and lets loose.

"The lorries are comin'. Soldiers'll be here in a minute or so. Go on then and keep close to me; we'll have to clear a path to the back faster than this," he says, and opens fire into the solid wall in front of them.

Kick of the pistol in his hand and all this sea parting before him, and the lorries rattling along with their tense cargo, he can smell the fuckers from here, all that sweat, and the loose bladders of the newest-

He shoots a man in the chest, blows the nose from another, punches a third fellow in the gut, gives him a good smacking with the pistol till he's lumpy with his beating, and down underfoot he shoves the lad, to be stomped unconscious, and here's the beau now, just thrashing all about him with that length of wood, and smiling as he does it, the glorious little asshole.

The girls reach for the same man and yield themselves to a gorgeous piece of teamwork, Rebekah with the gob blow shoves him straight back into the arms of Caroline, who rips off his head and snaps it right speedy into the face of some asshole who tries to gut her, and the stun of that just taking all the piss out of him, so that Rebekah has only to casually reach inside the arm he belatedly raises to block her, and pull the lad's heart still-thumping from his chest.

He gives a double executioner's tap to the heads of the last few fuckers blocking their exit, and a good blow with his boot and Kol springs the door wide as the lorries come screeching to the rescue out the front, the doors on them thundering open and the boots tap tapping their elephantine thunder, fifteen, oh say twenty of the lads with their armor just ringing-

"Everybody down! Everybody  _down_!" he hears from inside, and the first cracks of the guns.

Up onto the roof with Caroline, and Rebekah right after her, and sure enough a few coughs from the guns keeping their eyes skinned for the stragglers.

He loads on the run.

Two headshots for the lads he finds just round the corner, and then onto the next roof the girls sail, and he ducks round a building as some utter little shite glances a few ricochets off the pavement in front of him, rat a tat of the automatic doing a number on his poor old ears, and the whole world just reeling as he takes a skimmer to the noggin-

He shakes his head and pokes himself back round the side of the wall, to answer the man with two shots that bring the lad screaming to the ground, clutching his kneecaps, and now all the long and miserable hell shrieks of this night swelling their ranks as the soldiers start to get it back inside that bar, the lad with his bleeding kneecaps howling to outdo them all.

.45 to the forehead solves it.

Flip the cylinder open, spin the chamber to an empty slot, and a quick patdown of the pockets and he's out of speed loaders, so he's after fishing out a few of the loose bullets from all the little nooks and crannies of his vest and trousers when fuck him for a loose  _cunt_ of a diseased motherfuckin'  _whore_ , half his arm's for the motherfucking rubbish bin, it is-

Sting of the bullet in the meat of his shoulder plays all kinds of fuckass with his nerves, and clatter goes the pistol as his fingers pop open, and back round the side of the building he zips now as another shot chips the brick just inches off his left ear.

"I've got it," Kol says from right beside him, and saunters out into the middle of the street, casual as you please.

He chances a dart for his revolver when the sights make a hop for his friend, and jerk him to and fro, till he's staggering with the weight of all that lead, and takes a dramatic topple right into the street, clutching for his chest and stretching one hand heavenward, and choking loud enough for the rifleman to hear, "Listen, Rose…you're gonna' get out of here…you're gonna' go on and make lots of babies, and you're gonna'…watch them grow. You're gonna' die an old…old lady, warm in her bed, but not here…not this night. Not like this…do you understand me? Promise me…Rose. And never…let go…of that promise. Never…let go."

He flops his head to one side, his hands spasm, the legs give their final kick, and a last death sigh for the audience now, the eejit.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," he murmurs, trying not to laugh.

The soldier pokes his head out cautiously from his hiding place, and tippy toes it into the street with his rifle out before him, the breath just bellowing in his lungs.

He puts another in Kol's chest, and leaps back with the gun to his shoulder.

Not a twitch from his friend.

He ducks his head and quietly loads the last few rounds into his revolver, then snaps the cylinder shut with a flick of his wrist.

The boy leans over Kol.

And up he comes, fangs down, veins out, to practically take the poor dumb fuck's head right off with the force of his bite.

He sprays the lad everywhere as he pulls him down by the collar of his uniform, wrapping one arm around his waist to keep the boy upright as he feeds, and just sucking away with a moan that sets the blood to thundering in his…ears.

Kol lets him fall at last, and wipes some of the blood out of his stubble. "That was fun. Did you want some?"

"Not until I've swallowed all the vomit back down out of my throat. What did I tell you about quoting that fucking movie around me, you shit-shoveling pisslord?"

Kol breaks out in a smile to put his heart right out of his chest.

" _Titanic_ is the greatest comedy of the 20th century, Timothy Patrick."

"It's a pile of overwrought shit."

Kol slings an arm round his shoulders.

He pops him in the ass with his foot.

"I think you'll change your mind when you see it again."

"I'll fucking kill myself the second you pop the bloody DVD in."

"I'll wait," Kol says with his absolute shittiest smile, and snaps his teeth playfully at him.

"Did the girls get away then?"

"Yeah."

"Did you have it out with your sister?"

"She called me something I can't repeat in front of someone as young and impressionable as you, and then tried to shove me off the roof. Which means she's practically in love with me."

"So it was a good night, then," he says, and round Kol's neck goes his arm. "Do you want to go celebrate?"

They give each other a sideways sneak of a smile.

From inside the bar, there is a whole ugly chorus of screams, and a series of loud pops.

* * *

"Why are you wearing my clothes?" he asks as Caroline bounces rather merrily through the house, the sleeves of his best dress shirt rolled up to show the slight blonde down on her forearms, and the striations of some man's rather gruesome death.

"Um," she says, her eyes popping wide.

He lifts an eyebrow and waits.

"Rebekah and I…joined this…musical production called…Boys to Men."

"You mean that 90s R&B group that saw their first international success with the release of the single 'End of the Road'?" He flashes his dimples. "I'm not entirely deaf to the endless cycle of abominations spawned by pop culture, sweetheart."

"Well, it's also a musical," she replies primly, tucking a curl behind her ear. "Anyway, what are you doing lurking around like a creeper?"

He spreads his hands. "It's, um, it's an odd thing, actually. It's my house."

"Ok, well you could make a little noise while you're walking. To, like, warn people and stuff. I could have had a heart attack. And died." She narrows her eyes at him. "To  _death_."

He bursts out laughing, and he is rewarded with the sudden flash of that smile, the overlapping front teeth and the brightening of everything, eyes, cheeks, the sun in its long and dismal reign behind the last vestments of winter, and laugh if you will, Father, from your high and eternal perch, tallying his failures on fingers grown weary with disappointment.

He never should have opened anything, not to a creature such as this.

He understands that.

But he reaches out to take a piece of her hair anyway, and savors it between his fingers.

"Sooo…want to teach me some more Greek?" she asks, and he opens his mouth to reply and she is suddenly gone.

She returns a moment later with an armful of books. "Ok, so I got this primer the other day, because you kind of suck at breaking things down." She throws it into his own arms. "And then there's this slang book, because I'm sure they didn't just strut around in their togas all day swapping gossip in their most formal 'thees' and 'thines'." She piles it on.

"Togas were Roman, love."

"Whatever. And then here's a book on ancient attitudes toward sexuality, particularly of the boy/boy variety, because it looked interesting. And a biography on Alexander the Great. Umm…a beginning grammar book. Also a phrase book. And here's three different translations of the Iliad,"

She stacks them one on top of another, seating them rather roughly against his chest.

"A collection of Greek myths; a grammar workbook, aaaand…'The History of the Peloponnesian War'. I went through and highlighted any helpful tips and whatnot in the grammar books and bookmarked some of the phrases I think will most come in handy, and in this three ring binder I hold here in my hands, you will find a color-coded lesson plan that I've put together and labeled by day, hour, and minute. I really suggest you stick to it."

He opens his mouth to speak.

She claps her hands briskly. "Ok, so get cracking! You're wasting day three, minute four and a half."

* * *

When she has studied her eyes full of sand, and caught her weary cheek three times upon her hand, she subsides into his arms, and asks him to tell her a nice thing that's happened to him.

Just one, in all his one hundred bajillion years.

He keeps his arms carefully and stiffly where she has placed them, round her waist, and stares for a very long time at the top of her drooping head.

She has long slipped away when he coughs the tremor from his voice, and he tells her he watched the birth of his brother, and basked in his first smile, and in these days when he had the heart of a man, and not the pit of a monster, he felt it swell, and he thought to himself, see how-

See how he doesn't have to think about it?

Whether he's worthy, whether he's  _worth it_?

And Mikael couldn't take it from him.

He runs a finger tentatively along the curve of her cheek, and up over her nose, and in through his mouth he takes such a long breath, Caroline.

Sing, O Goddess, indeed, the wrath of a great man.

But where has it ever got him?

* * *

"A little dead birdy told me there's going to be a shipment of guns passed off to our friends the werewolves early tomorrow morning. If you tag along, I'll hand them off to you so you can take them back to Nik. And maybe…pass this along to my sister? I'll text you where to meet," Kol tells her the next morning after Klaus has left to see to some disturbance at one of their hotels, and then abruptly hangs up.

* * *

"I shouldn't have mentioned Rebekah," he says, and tosses his bat from hand to hand.

Tim lights his second cigarette and with the toe of his boot prods the dead man at his feet.

"She's not going to come." He takes a practice swing.

Tim kicks the man over the side of the dock and takes a good long drink of his cigarette.

"She's not coming, Tim," he says, and holds both his hands out to the side.

He drops the bat.

He runs a hand over his hair.

"Would you sit down? Come on," Tim tells him, and takes a seat on the edge of the dock, dangling his legs over the side. "Come on," he urges, jerking his head toward the empty space beside him, and patting it with his free hand as he slips the cigarette from between his lips. "She'll come or she won't come. Either way, clutching your pearls and getting all smelling salts about it isn't going change it, so come on, lad."

He drops down on the dock beside Tim and snatches the cigarette right out of his hand as it arcs back up toward his mouth, and a long drag and a longer exhale and he taps the ash into the water.

Tim hits him across the chest with the back of his hand.

He takes the cigarette packet from the pocket of his jacket and gives it an obvious rattle right underneath his nose. "I've got a whole pack of the things to snatch from, asshole!"

"I like this one better, precisely because it's not mine."

He blows his next breath right into Tim's face.

Tim bops him on the nose with his cigarette packet and slips another cigarette from it, lighting the tip and shaking the sting out of his fingers when the flame takes a nip from them.

"You'd think a 102 year habit and you wouldn't burn yourself on your lighter seven times out of ten."

"You'd think," Tim replies, and slings an arm round his shoulders.

They smoke for a long while, just looking out over the water, and listening to that faroff buzz of the approaching motorboat, and sniffing out the pulse of each man.

Somewhere away down the docks one of the wolves bubbles his final red struggles.

"Nice morning," Tim says, and leans against him, blowing a cloud skyward.

That lone stubborn survivor looses his bladder all over himself.

There, there, darling.

Happens to the best of dead men.

For instance, once there was this emperor, fastidious man, very particular with his hygiene habits, always just clockwork with his baths and his oils, draped to his nines, painted back to his yesteryear of smooth and flawless twenties.

He pissed everywhere.

It was quite funny, actually.

All those long and meticulous years, bending everything in your iron fist.

And in the end, the astringent yellow death anyway.

Dignity.

What a fickle bitch, is he right, darling?

He sets his head on Tim's shoulder as the man rattles out his last sighs.

And then:

Down the road, the hissing of tires on these sleeping roads, the endless clanking whir of all those gears and levers and pistons pumping, pumping, and the shush of gasoline through the lines, and there the sticking of hands gloved in their thin nerve sweat, flowing between gearshift and steering wheel, and the foot hopping from clutch to accelerator and back again.

And the hearts.

Two of them.

He scrambles to his feet.

He flicks his cigarette into the water and picks up his bat and down the road this vehicle flies, carrying with it the two hearts, the two sets of lungs, the shrill and nattering voices of one bitcher, one bitchee, and darlings-

If a smile could break your heart.

He arranges the bat over his shoulder.

Tim saunters up beside him with his hands in his pockets and the cigarette dying its sodden death in the waters of the harbor as Caroline jerks the car off the main road because Rebekah has complained that her driving is just devastating her hairdo, and slams on the brakes hard enough to give his sister's precious locks a good smacking on the headrest.

" _Caroline_ ," she snaps.

" _Rebekah_."

They exit like queens, the both of them, Caroline flicking her curls over her shoulder and giving this new and rising day her brightest smile, Bekah descending ungraciously to his vile and plebeian level with her nose in the air.

"Ladies," he says, walking out so casually to greet them.

Bekah gives Tim her bitchiest best. "Oh; you're here. What's your name again? Never mind; nobody cares." She adjusts the lightweight trench coat belted at her waist. "Caroline, where's my purse? I need to touch up my lipstick; this humidity is just horrendous."

"I don't  _know_! I'm not your valet!"

Bekah rolls her eyes. "You wouldn't be a valet; they were male. Anyway, it must still be in the car." She clicks her fingers. "Go and get it."

"Bite me!"

"Don't  _tempt_ me."

"You have been a bitch the whole way over here, and I know it's because you're nervous, so why don't you walk up to your brother, give him a hug, and make up like normal people do?"

"I'm not  _nervous_ , you're annoying!" Bekah hisses.

Caroline rolls her eyes. "She changed her outfit three times. And her lipstick five. And gave herself a completely new manicure even though the old one was perfectly fine."

"No it wasn't; you did it."

"Oh my God, would you stop bitching about how I do your nails!"

"I wouldn't have to bitch if you'd do it correctly."

"If you hate the way I do it  _so much_ , then why don't you do it yourself?"

"Excuse me?" Bekah snaps. "Am I a servant? I'd say you should be drawing my baths as well, but you'd probably put vervain in them."

"You could count on it," Caroline says sweetly.

Tim awkwardly rubs the back of his neck, and darts a sideways glance at him.

"Ladies; if you're done poking out one another's eyes, our friends are here," he interjects, and turns to greet the boat pulling up to the end of the dock with his best smile.

He hears Tim slide a hand into his pocket for a good grip on his revolver and the slow and dying sputter of the boat's engine settling to an idle, and then all those pattering little hearts straighten his back and tighten the hand on his bat, and he steps forward with his head tilted, his smile gone.

Vampires.

Interesting.

"You're not who we're supposed to be meeting," the man at the wheel says, and turns the key, so that the silence has room to grow, and settle into all this space between monster and monster.

"We're not?" he asks with great surprise in his voice.

Tim thumbs the hammer on his revolver.

"Take your hand out of your fucking pocket!" the man roars, and now the half dozen of them pop up from their seats with the long black muzzles of their own weapons pointing out over the boat, the safeties click click clicking their noisy releases.

"We'd just like our guns, thank you, and then you can all be on your way, darlings. If you stop pointing those things at my friend."

"Oh shit," the man behind the wheel suddenly blurts out, and all the color drains itself from his cheeks.

He smiles.

"I see you've recognized me. Excellent, darling. Now, I don't like to brag, but, once when I was in Moscow-"

"The blonde one on the right is Klaus' girl," the man says, and runs a hand nervously down his face.

"Actually, Klaus is my boy," Caroline snips back at the man.

He squints his eyes at this man with his wavering hand and his shaking voice, and turns round to take an incredulous peek at Caroline, who stands with arms crossed, hip cocked out to one side, his sister beside her attending her nails with a file she has pulled from he knows not where.

" _Caroline_? You're afraid of  _Caroline_?"

Tim starts to laugh.

"Don't be an asshole, Tim." He turns back to the man. "You don't know who I am, but you know Caroline."

"You've been in a box for nearly a century, Kol. And then dead for another year or so on top of that." Bekah cocks her head and holds out her hand to give a squint to her nails. "Your reputation just isn't what it used to be."

"But I ate a whole church once. And then I burned it down. There were children inside."

"Nobody cares anymore," Bekah tells him. "That was so 1783."

He snaps his fingers. "What about that coven of witches? What were they called again? Anyway, it's not important. Surely you've at least heard of that."

The man flicks his eyes only very briefly toward him, and then brings that flinching gaze right back round to Caroline.

"This is a complete outrage."

The boys all nervously roll their shoulders, and set their eyes back to the sights.

"Tell your friend to take his hand out of his pocket, if you're so intimidating," the man snaps.

"Wait," one of the men calls out suddenly from the lineup, and his gun wavers, takes a dip, nervously jitters its way back to Tim's chest. " _Kol_ , you dumbfuck. Kol Mikaelson."

" _Thank_ you, darling." He points at the man. "You I'll kill very quickly."

So the man behind the wheel swings round with sweat on his brow, and squeezes off the most revolutionary of his shots, straight for the chest of poor Tim with his hand still impotently buried.

Maybe he and Tim give off some sort of vibe.

Kill the one and you have ended them both.

But he misses by a wide foot.

And anyway.

From all the days of his pink-cheeked youth, chasing God with blood on his chin, and Nik at his back, impotency has never been the issue, darlings.

Insert eyebrow wiggle here.

So the man misses, and Tim's answering shot reels him over the side of the boat, into the water where he spreads a pink fog in this silent morning mirror, and now a mere step, two, three, puts him and his bat at the end of the dock with the boat still rocking out the last shockwaves of the man's death as the remaining five open fire, and another shot over his shoulder plugs a second one in the chest.

He rips the shotgun from the hands of the third, tosses it blindly over his shoulder, hears the slap of it land, sees in his peripheral vision Tim pump it one-handed, and shoot the fourth man point-blank in the chest.

The third he kills.

The fifth he knocks headfirst into the side of the boat as he vaults aboard.

He turns the key in the ignition.

He tosses his bat to Tim, who has pocketed his revolver once more and catches it easily.

He hauls the man still blinking the stars from his eyes onto his feet, and takes a bow. "For Bekah," he says, and his sister crosses her arms and gives him her best impress-me eyebrow lift, and so he jerks the man collar-first toward the rear of the boat, and jams his face into the prop.

Well, that's interesting.

Reminds him of one of those apple peelers, the skin just unwinding and unwinding, long coils of it flying hither and thither oh my.

Caroline's trying so hard not to be fascinated, the veins faintly showing through that polished and pampered skin.

Might as well get used to it, darling.

You're practically married to it, after all.

He pulls the man up out of the prop. "Oops; I think this was the one I promised to kill quickly. This was ungentlemanly of me." He wrinkles his nose. "Sorry about that, darling. I guess I'm just not very trustworthy."

He pushes that mashed and mangled face back into the prop, but it's all gummed up now, slow with blood and bone, and spinning not nearly fast enough to make things interesting anymore, so he hauls the man upright once more, and gently dusts the skin from his shoulders.

"Bekah? Would you like the final honor?" he asks, and in a moment she has flashed up beside him, shoulder to shoulder the way it was always meant to be, and yanked the man's heart from his chest with her long and perfect nails.

"So much for that manicure," she sighs, and holds out her hand.

He bows gallantly over it to kiss the blood from her fingers.

* * *

Caroline and Bekah are squabbling in the front seat, the crate of guns nestled safely in the back row of the SUV when he takes a running leap for the open window and hurls himself across the back seat, Tim fumbling in right after him, and laughing his head off as he sticks and has to wriggle his broad shoulders through the frame.

He grabs Tim by the arm and yanks.

His long legs flail, his cap slips, he strains forward with his hands round the window frame, the metal creaking beneath his strength, and now a sudden lurch and Tim upends in his lap, still laughing.

"Go! Go!" he yells to Caroline, and pounds enthusiastically on the back of her seat.

Both the girls twist round to stare at them.

"What the hell are you doing?" Caroline demands. "What are you running from? Everyone's dead."

"Caroline, you don't enter by the doors after a gun battle; that's so anti-climatic, darling." He puts his feet up on the arm rest between her and Bekah.

Both the girls reach to slap them off at the same time.

"All right, darling. We ride!" he says as a car pulls slowly off the main road, and begins to wind its way toward them. "Someone's going to have a rather nasty surprise on their way to take the yacht out for a cruise. Maybe we can hang round and listen to their screams for a while," he says as Tim sits upright, setting his hat to rights and adjusting the gun in his pocket.

He reaches out to adjust the other gun in Tim's trousers, and Caroline snaps, "Hey!" and whirls round to point a finger at him. "No hand jobs in the car!"

"I don't like that rule."

"Too bad. I'm the driver."

"Driver doesn't make the rules."

"Yes, they do. Especially when I'm the driver."

"Kol," his sister says.

"Darling, I don't think you understand the pecking order here. It goes handsomest, oldest, and then you and Tim can fight for the last spot. Don't underestimate him, though. He's a very dirty fighter. Don't let his face fool you."

" _Kol_ ," Bekah whispers, and he hears the sudden acceleration of her heart, and all the sudden rush of her blood within her veins, and he looks out the window.

The car has glided to a stop mere feet from them.

The passenger door opens, and down drops that first expensive boot, and then out ducks the blond head, and now here is his whole and smiling brother, his curls in angelic profusion today, and his skin youthful with his morning shave.

Nik's smile is very dangerous.

He feels Tim's hand grip his leg, and Caroline's close with a creaking of bone over the steering wheel, and Bekah, poor Bekah.

She can't help it, how much she loves him.

And of course it wasn't worth it, to throw over one brother for another, to chance her long and dusty sleep for  _this_ brother of all brothers, of course she turns pale, and brings a fumbling hand to her throat, where she must feel already Nik's warm and loving fingers.

He jerks the revolver out of Tim's pocket.

Out the door and onto the gravel, each sharp little pop keeping time under his boots, the whole world thundering around him, Nik's rage, Bekah's heart, Tim's last long breath, and all the silence of his captive next.

Nik takes a step.

Caroline tightens her hands.

Tim pops his door, and he's grateful for that, darling.

But he's just fast enough.

He shoots Nik in the head.

Caroline screams.

Nik's allies sit for a moment in mute astonishment as they watch this great and unconquerable man sag with unrecognizable face into the gravel, and he's no time to waste on them, Nik will come to in a moment, so he blurs right back to the car, seizing Tim's arm on his way in and pulling the boy after him, the door slamming so hard it rocks the entire SUV.

"Drive, Caroline," he says, handing the revolver back to Tim.

She sits with her uncomprehending hands fixed to the wheel, and her wide eyes on Nik.

"I said  _drive_!" he screams, and she jerks from her stupor to ram the car into gear and take off in a cloud of gravel, clipping one of Nik's minions as he leaps from the driver's seat, and spraying pieces of him messily across the window.

She jerks the lever for the windshield wipers and bursts onto the main road at 60 mph.

They ride in utter silence all the way to the Marriott.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Yes, Kol joining in on a song and dance number with a bunch of vampires cross dressing as female serial killers is a thing that just happened. 'The Ballad of Sweeney Todd' is from the musical 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street'. It's a warm and fuzzy story about a man who returns to London fifteen years after getting the heave-ho from a judge who conjured up some false criminal charges so he could set about getting Todd's wife all to himself. Upon his return, he learns that the judge and a loyal minion lured his wife to the judge's home, raped her, and that she afterward poisoned herself, so that their daughter has now been left as a ward in the care of the judge. There follows a whole lot of kooky shenanigans that involve the killing of Todd's clients with his straight razor and then having them baked into the meat pies of his cohort Mrs. Lovett. Anyway, take your children to see it. Point is, the human in the barber chair is basically a live reenactment of the musical.
> 
> Klaus' 'Sing, O Goddess, indeed, the wrath of a great man' is a nod to The Iliad.
> 
> Everybody is now in the shitter with Klaus, for some reason vampires were delivering weapons to werewolves, where's Marcel, etc. etc. Good place to leave off, I think.
> 
> There are two very specific scenes I want to end this fic with, so there will be one more part to this, making it the longest entry in the series. There's a lot of violence coming up in this next part. Caroline will be a part of it. One of these very specific scenes is hers, actually.


	5. Part Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Not much to say here, other than that this part hits the ground running and really doesn't let up. It is also the final part of this fic.
> 
> Really quickly- the 'crypts' that come up later on you may (probably not) remember from way back in the third one-shot, when Sophie has Caroline kidnapped. That's what Caroline is referencing. You'll understand, once you start reading.
> 
> Other than that, just hold onto your pants.

He is only a boy.

A murdery, megalomaniac, nut job  _douche_ hat of a boy, but still with that tender little thing between his legs that drops him with a scream when you kick it.

So she storms the trenches like she is invincible, such a little thing, Caroline Marie Forbes, and so blonde, so blonde, the poor stupid thing, painted nails, shining hair, all of her gloss and fluff, but she has her teeth, and the hearts of greats in her palm.

You might think it's not enough.

So she'll dent her pretty pink polish on the door and fluff out her curls and stand with the morning beginning just behind her, and she will have  _presence_ she will  _matter_ and somewhere the great wheels of the narrative will turn, and turn, and God, Zeus, Satan,  _whoever_ with his pen to the clouds will say, "Ah, yes, here was an Important Moment and it starred Caroline Forbes.'

And there'll be a happy ending.

Because Caroline the Girl did not have long enough, but Caroline the Monster will for eons run it to ground, until it has nowhere left to turn but her.

So,  _yes_ , the blood beats in her throat, her fingers have gone to wood, she feels all the tingling anesthetic of her toes, the breath moves like sandpaper in her lungs, she is all freaking pulse, just standing here in his doorway, staring down at him in his chair, but  _nothing_. Lasts. Forever.

She will not always be afraid.

He will not always be betrayed.

It only feels like it, here with his unsmiling face just barely tipped up toward her.

It's not that he's mad, when he looks at her.

It's that he loves her.

And he doesn't know  _why_ he doesn't understand  _how_ , a man like him, a  _thing_ like him, he's seen  _everything_ he's condemned  _nothing_ he has slithered in every  _freaking_ black corner and laughed at what he's found, but her,  _her_ -

It's amazing, the things you can still see on his face.

When he should have long wiped them all away.

It deflates her just a little, because she knows, she  _knows_ , it's not about being the villain, it's not about posturing, it's not about proving, it's not about Klaus the All-Powerful, it's Klaus the Brother, it's Klaus the Unchosen, it's Klaus the Never Wanted.

So she lets him go first.

She shuts the door behind her, she uncrosses her arms, she lets them hang at her sides, she lets him look, and see-

She is not here to fight.

She came back.

She came back and she knows that  _means something_ , she knows he will understand all these different avenues she had, and the ways she could have gone and still she turned around, she  _turned around_ and she is  _standing here_  with her arms open, and all he has to do is step into them, and just let it go.

But he says: "Where is he?" in his most toneless voice.

She watches his lashes flicker, and the big hands curve around the frail chair arms.

She plants her feet.

"I'm not telling you."

And he explodes off his chair and grabs her by the arms and this time he screams it, " _Where is he_?!" right in her face, hot and damp and everything roaring in her now, heart, blood, breath, his fingers denting her coat, denting her skin, denting her bones, their faces so close her breaths are his secondhand air, and he bears her back, back, all the way across the front entry and into the door, so that for a moment she is pinned against it, all his weight against her, and she remembers another boy she couldn't get out from underneath, and his rough hands and his wet lips and just lying there on that bed where mommy used to tuck her in at night and wondering mom,  _mom_ , where are you  _now_ and  _God_ do you know how she fought, and he just, he  _laughed_ -

She shoves him as hard as she can. "Get off me!  _Get off me_!" she shrieks, and shoves him again, putting everything she has into it, and he's startled, or ashamed, she doesn't know which, but he lets go, he  _lets go_ , imagine that,  _all on her own_ , she pushes and a boy gives-

He stumbles back a couple of steps.

She keeps the door at her back, and she breathes, one, two, slow in, out, both of them just staring at one another now.

Klaus faces squarely off against her, but he doesn't take another step forward. "Tell me where my brother is, Caroline."

"No."

He flashes in close enough for their hips to brush, and his breath to ruffle her neck, and scatter her hair, but he doesn't touch her, he doesn't lean into her or graze so much as a finger down her quivering neck, he just stands there, his eyes terrifying. "Then I'll compel it out of you. And you can come along for the ride, so that you understand how fortunate you are, standing here with not a hair on your head out of place."

She takes a breath and she swallows her heart and she closes what little distance is left between them. " _No_. I am not that girl anymore.  _No one_ is going to use me like that again.  _Ever_ , Klaus. Do it, and I will leave. And you can chase me for a trillion years, but I will never,  _ever_ forgive you for being another Damon."

His shoulders hitch, his pupils dilate, she sees all his rage move through him like something tangible beneath his skin, fingers clenching, nostrils flaring, that little head tilt he gets when he's truly not amused, when some little ant has dared put their hand to his boot, and push back, and her gut churns, she tastes it in her throat, she thinks, oh God, oh God, he's going to do it anyway-

He steps back.

"Get out," he says thunderously.

"Klaus."

"Get  _out_ , Caroline!"

She pushes off the door. "Your sister is too afraid to come back here and face you, and I think that's crap!" she shouts, and he's turned his back on her, he's walking away, but he can't  _shut her out_ , his stupid  _jerk_ ass is going to listen to every damn word she has to say, he's not the only one around here who knows how to assert a freaking  _opinion_ -

"I think it's crap, and I know, I  _know_ you can make better choices."

He stops.

"You're not angry because they disobeyed you. You're angry because they're leaving you. You're angry because you're afraid of their other options, you're afraid anytime anyone has another choice they'll always pick it and never you, but you are doing exactly,  _exactly_ everything you can to ensure that's what they always do. Because you will always be the worst option. That's what you think. But I know that's not true. So go ahead and prove me wrong, you stupid jerk," she snaps, and she sniffs and hiccups a little and she doesn't know where they all came from, these tears, so quickly, so many of them, burning throat, eyes, chest, everything just so freaking  _full_ , all her grandiose words drowning in them, so say good-bye to her elaborate SAT vocabulary, this is her, just  _her_ , Caroline Forbes and a heart and a sleeve, and she hopes it's enough.

"Kill Tim, and make Kol watch you take away something that makes him happy, just because it's not you. And then dagger him and Rebekah both. And Elijah while you're at it. And be all alone. And pretend like this was all about them and not you. And prove to me that I'm just some stupid little girl who doesn't know anything, who put her faith in all the wrong places." She wipes her eyes. "Go ahead and do that, Klaus. But I'll wait. And until I have absolute proof that I was wrong, that I was so wrong, I'm going to keep knowing that you're capable of something better."

She can't tell whether she has broken or remade him.

But his face-

His face is just so painful to look at.

It's not the time to take it between her hands, and stroke her thumbs gently along the cheekbones, and sift the curls like he is the fresh newborn with so much still to comprehend and not she, but God, she wants to.

And then he clasps his hands behind his back, and looks up at her through his lashes like she is just another thing for him to stare at when he's nowhere else to put his eyes.

"Get out of my house, Caroline," he says quietly.

And she does.

* * *

Bekah is shaking so hard he has to help her down into the chair Tim has discreetly moved over from the corner of their hotel room.

"What am I going to do; what am I going to do?" she whispers to herself, clasping her hands in her lap, and he likes that, not 'we' but 'I', his selfish brat sibling whose face he touches gently anyway as he sinks down onto the bed, so that he is facing her, his knees to either side of hers, and their hands in the space between their legs, tightly laced, and just guess, darlings, who reached out first, but it's all right.

It's all right.

He lifts both her hands and kisses them.

He gives her his best smile, the one to flutter hearts, lengthen dicks, but it's never worked on her, and still he tries, nine hundred years, and still he tries.

"I'll give you two a moment, and go down to the bar," Tim says softly, and trails a hand gently across the back of his head on his way past.

"Hey," he calls out, looking up from Bekah for a moment. "Don't go far. We don't know where Nik is."

"Yeah; I'll just be down at the bar. Won't put a toe outside it. You can come and get me when you're done."

"All right. See you in a few minutes."

The door shuts.

"Bekah," he says with another smile, and chafes her cold hands between his. "Listen, darling. You can relax your panties. You don't have to let him hurt you. Not if we're together, right?"

She doesn't look at him.

It's not fear. Bekah has always stared coldly at her fear, with just the slightest tremor in her lips, for it is only a mere girl who quails and puts up her fair hands and blocks off her pretty lashes from what horrors time and love will bring, and his sister has never subscribed to those fairytale notions of what maidens ought to be.

So it's her shame then.

But he knew that.

"I wish I loved you more," she whispers.

He knows, darling.

_Oh_ , he knows.

* * *

He finds Tim downstairs in the bar, alone with his bartender and his beer, not drinking but just rolling the glass between his hands, and takes a seat on the stool beside him.

"So?" Tim asks. "What's the plan?"

"She's going back home."

Tim is silent for a long moment. "You're not going to follow her?"

"No; she didn't want me to. So it's up to Nik now."

He takes a drink of Tim's beer, swirling it round his mouth, and looking out through the far window, to watch the day start herself off right, in happy and yellow profusion.

Nik.

She will always come back to you.

Is that her tragedy, or yours?

* * *

Bekah tucks her hair nervously behind her ears and haughtily raises her chin and tells him she will not give up one brother for another, and how courageous, sister dear, in your quaking boots, your shaking hands, your quavering skin, flinching at his gaze as a horse switches flies from its flanks.

But you already have, sweetheart.

He stabs her not once, but twice, three times with the dagger, holding her by the hair, that precious commodity of the vain, and giving a jerk to quiet her when she opens her mouth to scream, shh, there's a good girl, wouldn't want that pretty mane in tatters round your feet, now would we, sister, shh shh shh, Bekah, it'll all be over soon, love, you know that.

He lets her sag to the floor, and stands looking down at her.

O ye of little faith.

How right you were.

Choose him now, Caroline, from your high and lofty perch of the faithful few.

* * *

She is still crying by the time she makes it to Audubon Park, but that's the thing about crying.

No one wants to know.

So they look away, they let you pick your way to the most private of trees, they skip their eyes right on past and hurry their jogs and say to themselves, not my problem, I am a stranger and I shall not intrude, but she could have told any one of them, it's not about intrusion, it's about knowing on all this planet, among the seven billion lungs and seven billion thump thumping hearts that cry out not for you-

Just for one to pause, and care.

That would be nice.

But she sits alone under her tree and leans her head back against the trunk and she stares for a long time at the sky, watching it brighten and brighten, not a freaking rain cloud in sight, of course, sky and heart- they never match, and she fiddles with the phone in her pocket and the necklace around her throat and she thinks about his face, so wrecked, the  _jerk_ , and she just hopes, she  _prays_ -

Don't make her choose one of those other avenues.

She will sit her with her unerring heart and she won't be unafraid, of course not, that's never a part of life or love or any of the parts that make your two feet on the ground and not underneath worth it, but she'll believe, despite everything.

It's all you can ask of her.

Her phone vibrates.

* * *

He lines up his most faithful dozen, and walks the length of them with his hands behind his back.

"I'd like to make a final push, today. And let me emphasize something imperative: don't come back until you succeed."

He smiles.

"I'm sure I don't have to describe in any great detail what will happen if you do. After all, Greg here has proved to be quite the example, hmm?" He motions to this greasy mess of topsy-turvy man at their feet, his outsides insides, or is it his insides which are now outsides, mates?- anyway, one never can tell for sure, a muddle like that.

Have to get someone poor to mop it up.

But then that's his sister sneaking through.

The poor are not inherently inferior.

Just downtrodden.

And who can't relate to that?

He smiles once more.

Poor lads are beginning to look a bit twitchy.

"Anyway. Most of you recall your former comrade Tim O'Sullivan. For those who have more recently joined our ranks, you're looking for a very tall man, early 20th century dress, wearing one of those newsboy caps. He'll have a thick Irish accent, blue eyes, brown hair- quite the pretty boy. My brother will be harder to corral. So you'll be after Tim. He's a little over a century, but not to be underestimated for his relative youth- he had an excellent teacher. Just subdue him; don't hurt him, and under no circumstances, no matter the danger to yourself or your friends, kill him." He claps his hands together. "My sister was kind enough to have used the soap a certain hotel stocks their guest rooms with before her untimely demise, so that's a nice hint. I'll take a few of you with me, and send the rest off into the city, just in case they've made off already. Contact me as soon as you've located him. And please," he says, graciously extending his hand, and smiling so that his dimples are in full effect, "take him to the ruins out at Fort Macomb. He'll understand what he's in for."

* * *

She doesn't recognize the number.

"Is everyone ok?" she asks Kol, and on the other end of the line there is a long breath, a human heart, and now her own takes flight, because she knows that breath, she knows that heart, and even if it's just the most insignificant of 'hi honey's, she bursts into tears.

No mother's greeting is ever insignificant to a daughter.

So she scrambles onto her knees like she's praying, and she's smiling, Mommy, really she is, maybe it doesn't sound like it, with all her very long morning stuffed into her throat, and her words broken like a little girl's, and coughed up in pieces, and dribbled here onto the grass with everyone just staring and staring as they drift past with their dogs and their lover's arms in links, wondering who is this crazy in the three hundred dollar shoes, sobbing like she's dying.

But oh God, Mom, Mommy, she's just so,  _so_  happy to hear from you.

"Caroline, sweetie? Are you all right?"

"Yes! Yes, Mom, I'm fine. I'm ok," she says, and she laughs, if you can believe that there is any one person in this universe who can pull such a sound out of her through this slush of snot and saltwater.

She wipes her eyes.

In the background, a man says, "Tell her now," and another jogger passes and a dog puts out its curious nose to skim her hand as he pants past, and she blinks.

"Mom, who's that?"

"It's nobody sweetie. I just called to check in on you; I feel like we haven't talked in forever."

But it's too bright, and it's strained, and all down her spine there is a ripple like wind on this bright and motionless morning.

"I said  _tell her_ , bitch," someone snaps, and then she hears Tyler's voice.

"Hey, hey,  _hey_! Calm down, Nate. Ok? Just calm down. Liz, you're ok. He's not going to hurt you, I promise."

"Tyler," she says, very low in her throat.

"Tyler. Put Tyler on," she tells her mother, and there is something just building and building inside her now.

"You're going to bring everything you've got on Klaus Mikaelson to us, every contact, every weak spot, everything you know, or your mom dies," that background voice says again, and she slowly stands, the tears drying on her cheeks, and the pedestrians skittering away as this something building and building inside her makes its way to her face.

"Put. Tyler. On," she grinds out, and then here he is, right in her ear, just so tired, this boy she used to love.

And she gets that.

She does.

But this is the wrong girl's mother.

"I'm so sorry, Care. I tried to do this a different way. I won't let them hurt her, ok? You know that, right? It'll be ok, Care. Just bring us anything you can, anything that could help us, and we'll let her go, the very second you do that, Care, I promise. I'll call you later tonight with a meeting spot."

She hangs up.

A woman dodges her in a wide arc.

A man turns around and jogs back the way he came as she steps onto the footpath.

No need, actually.

She recognizes that particular bounce in your voice, the way it leaps and leaps from wall to wall, and the drip drip of the dank and sweating walls.

She spent some time down there herself.

So, see, she knows exactly where to meet you.

And now she's coming for you all.

* * *

He gets the spooks up his spine when they are switching hotels, rucksack over his shoulder and revolver in his pocket, Kol with a second bag in his hand, and half his packet of fags all fanned out in his mouth, the fuckin' eejit.

"Do you think I'll die if I smoke these all at once?" Kol asks, and nods toward the window.

Gone pale in the cheeks, he has, and now the heart up in his own throat and all the gall of his seasick old guts on his tongue, pulse in his fingertips, thump thump thump all the fucking length of him-

Kol spits the cigarettes onto the floor and eases open the window.

They stand listening to the footsteps for a moment, half a dozen in all, and the hearts with that familiar thumpity thumpity of the monster, the boots shush shushing their way down the hall carpet.

Kol's face relaxes. "I don't think Nik's with them. Six are easy enough to handle, if they're here for us."

He shuts the window, and winks.

"What kind of responsible, law-abiding citizen stays in a hotel room and doesn't trash it, anyway?"

So he tosses his bag onto the floor beside his friend's and then onto the bed with both of them, their knees touching, Kol tapping his foot to whatever beat he's got on the repeat in his head, and he gives his pockets a good feel-up for his fags and pulls the little crinkled packet from his right pocket to find the bundle of them all awash in his friend's spit on the floor was the very last of them.

Kol smiles at him.

"You absolute fucker," he says, and then on away past their room the footsteps tromp, and they look at one another with an eyebrow raise and a shrug.

"Some lucky werewolf or another must be dying today," Kol says, and stands with an arch of his back that loudly pops his spine.

They are shoving one another as they walk out into the bright white day, giddy with their nerves now, and the hot and tinglies of another noose slipped, and because their antics have drawn an eye or three, Kol yanks him down for a good tonguing just as a mother and her wee boy walk past, the boy pointing and the woman shielding his pure and untainted eyes from this love so much uglier than that clean and unbroken snowfall of man and woman.

But, ah, fuck your stick and the asshole's sucked it all to Kingdom Come.

You don't know the insides of a man like him, and all the warm and familiar pangs of love, same as the fuzzies between that proper dick you're walking the good and moral twat home to.

He is still smiling down at Kol when the driver's door of one of the police cruisers across the street pops open.

Couple more up the street, here in the heart of the French Quarter, with the violence closest to boil, and these too open to spill their uniformed passengers into the street, but no one takes any notice of that, not anymore, war zone like this, all a-bristle with the soldiers, but his friend now, there's a head that turns at their approach.

And through the crowd he feels with his own senses until he unravels from the dozens of human pulses the sprinting of these coppers' hearts, and makes an instinctive dart for his pocket.

"Hands in the air! Put your hands in the air!" one of them screams, and suddenly everyone's battering him every which way now, shrieking on down the sidewalks or throwing themselves flat, the precious babes cradled to the mammy's chests, safe behind their veils of hair and mother's tears, and now Kol stepping in front of him to yell, "Don't shoot! Don't  _shoot_!" hands out in front of him, and the air like a sprinter's gust in his throat.

"Get down on the ground! Get down on the fucking  _ground_!" one of the coppers yells, gesturing with his pistol as his lads fan out to either side of them.

"Get down on your knees, Tim," Kol says carefully, still keeping himself first in the line of fire, legs wide-spread and the elbows winged out so that at least they've only his head to pop away at, and not this frail little rabbit thing knocking at his sternum.

He obeys very slowly, lacing his hands behind his head.

"Kol," he says hoarsely as that familiar blonde head bobs up from the other side of one of the police cruisers.

"Just stay down, Tim. All right? Stay down. Keep your hand away from your pocket."

Kol turns round to look at him, just for a moment as the coppers retake their intervals, so there are sights on the both of them now, and then from around the bonnet of that police cruiser comes the brother just strolling so casually, gun in his own hand, dimples in his cheeks.

"Nik, please," Kol says, taking a step forward, like there's anything to be reached inside this man with the outstretched hand of a brother. "Nik,  _don't_."

"If the other one moves an inch, shoot him in the heart," Klaus orders, and then he smiles, just for his brother, so softly you might think there's a man yet in the beast, and then he says, "Par for the course, don't you think, little brother?" and he shoots Kol in either kneecap.

He goes down screaming.

And the shrieks of Dante's damned rise round him to poke themselves like glass into his ears, all those mothers and their children crying out, crying out, and his friend trying to stand, so that he may face his brother like a man, and another loud crack and down he goes again, flat onto his back, bleeding from the gut, and frothing it up out of his lips-

"What do you think, Tim? Where should the next one go?" Klaus asks playfully. "Or maybe I should bring out a different kind of wood. This stuff's a bit harmless for my brother."

His fingers slip-slide where he's laced them in a puddle of their own panic sweat and his eyes burn themselves blind on this film he's got layered over the whole fecking scene, Kol's twitching hand and restless lids and the blown-out jeans and the blown-out brains that spray themselves across his face and the screamer beside him who jaws away and away at her fear, but, oh, he couldn't even kill him, it's the side of the skull opened to spill away the great gray intestines wriggling at his knees, and his friend functionless in a puddle of his own piss, but still blinking, still gasping at the sky, still clinging and clinging, so that he won't even sleep his way through that final thrust of the fatal white blade-

"Please," he whispers. "He's your brother. He's your fucking  _brother_."

And the snot and the drool and all manner of unpleasants that come out of him as he starts to sob, still with his hands laced behind his head, and his knees in Kol's brains, and this shit, this fucking cuntsore assfucker whoreson  _shit_  just staring down at them both, the brother trying to breathe and the faggot with his great whooping little girl cries.

"He won't do it again- I swear he won't, he'll never see me again, but don't kill him, don't you kill him-"

"No," Klaus says, tilting his head. "I imagine he won't."

He shoots Kol between the eyes.

"Now, Timothy. You have a choice. Would you like to stay here? Make your way somewhere into the world, alone but alive? You can do that," he whispers silkily. "But I'm going to take Kol away with me, and you can only imagine the things he'll have to face by himself."

He hands the pistol off to one of his boys.

He sweeps his arm toward the road.

"Go ahead. Make a run for it, mate."

And, oh, he thinks about it, in all the ugly little depths of him.

Just a babe, compared to these men of mummified centuries upon centuries, and not ready for his grave, of course he's thought about it, at the end of his ropes and staring down the cold black eye of his pistol with the sights that clink against his teeth, but there is always,  _always_ something to be got at through the dark spots-

But that poor precious head in the red and gray.

And the family shutting themselves up tight against him, and abandoning him to scratch round the edges, so that what he understands- what he understands with his nine hundred years is if death leaves a man alone long enough, it's because everything stops caring, he's not worth a halfhearted swipe of the sickle, Time has forgotten him in all his pink and glowing youth, he has slipped between the cracks, he has used up his fleeting and finite second looks.

"No," he says, and works his throat round the knot in it. "No, I'll go with him. I'll go with him," he chokes out, and looks up from the shut and sticky eyes to those baby blue sparklers used to send the jolts all the way down to his toes.

Klaus smiles, and oh, Ma.

If he ever looked this happy, ruining a man.

The pavement disappears from beneath his knees and he hears the pop of a tendon as both his arms are twisted up behind his back and now those lips right against his ear, and his legs go right out from underneath him, he's that scared, but Klaus gladly holding him up, and almost gently, and resting them cheek to cheek as they both stare down at this mangled ruin of brother/lover, lying with his arms across his chest, and his knees showing through the holes in his trousers.

He can hear the smile in Klaus' voice. "I was hoping you'd say that. Actually, mate -you'll find this interesting, I know- it wasn't him I was after at all right now. I just wanted to see the look on your face, knowing you chose what comes next."

And the squeeze of that round his heart, and the flail this puts into his feet, and the breaths like sobs back in his throat now, and oh Jesus Mary and  _Joseph_ , preserve him.

"Now Timothy," Klaus says.

"This will only hurt for a moment."

* * *

She watches the house for a good hour to be sure Klaus is gone, and then she tip-toes her way through the eerie silence, and hurries through five breathless minutes of tucking into her pockets anything incendiary, noisy, stabby.

She ties her coat at the middle, and sinks her hands into her pockets, and she bounces away down the sidewalk like any pretty young thing out for her afternoon stroll, flipping her curls and smiling for the cops and feeling with each click of her heels the jostling of the three smoke grenades, the little stiletto in its leather sheath, the pearl-handled snub-nose she unearthed from one of Klaus' drawers.

And you know no one looks at her, a girl like the sun, it's the boys with their hoods that get the stop and frisk, and she just sails on by wriggling her pink nails for the cars that honk at her hips.

* * *

He enjoys watching the boy wake up.

Slowly, one limb at a time, a twitch of one foot and then an answering spasm of the other, and a leisurely uncurling of the left hand, now the right, those long lashes, fluttering, fluttering, and now those pretty baby blues, mate, wide as a child's.

He loves that.

They always look so surprised.

And the smell of them.

All that terror, shed from every orifice of Man.

This boy has looked into the abyss and crawled through the shadows and knelt there with all the sins decent men ought not to know let alone commit, and so his bowels do not loosen, his bladder maintains its feeble dignity, he lifts his eyes to gaze not upon the humble boots of this spectral prowler of childhood closets, he meets him face to face, but, ah, here's the rub, for our poor Timothy.

His sweat gathers along neckline, scalpline, forearm, spine.

And how delicious it smells, mate, just thick with this rank panic of the trenches.

He cups Tim's cheeks in both hands, and runs his thumbs contemplatively down them, tilting his head, and just this soft pressure, this tread of gentle pad, careful nail, and the boy shudders and squeezes his eyes shut and opens his mouth to let loose the first of his pathetic cries.

"You might be wondering where Kol is," he says tenderly, brushing the hair back from Tim's eyes. "I left him. On that sidewalk. He'll come to soon enough, don't worry. The real question is, how long will he leave you here, do you think?"

The boy's head droops, his shoulders follow, he tries so hard, poor thing, for this steely nonchalance of the scripted brave.

"Tim," he says gently. "How long, do you think? Or will he come at all, knowing what lies in wait? And how will you live with yourself, knowing you want him to? Hanging here between our little interactions, feeling your bones re-knit, your skin sew itself back together, the teeth push themselves back up through the gums, that displaced jaw, slowly crumpling itself back into place -just  _hanging_ here, mate- by the way, I hope you appreciate the nod to your former faith; bit heavy-handed I know, but I've always wanted to crucify someone; not too itchy, those nails, are they? Vervain-coated, of course, I'm sure you noticed- hanging here, listening to nothing but the tick tick tick tock of your final moments just…slipping away, and thinking to yourself…somewhere out there, is a boy I love."

He grabs Tim's face roughly now, and jerks his head up hard enough to pop his neck.

He smiles, and caresses the boy's cheek with the back of his hand.

"And I want him to step right into this trap. Just for me. Just to prove my final fatal choice was no waste of my soft and pathetic heart."

He watches Tim's nostrils flare, his lips tremble, the slow and steady beading of his brow.

* * *

She strolls casually through the graveyard where she first came to blows with Sophie Devereaux and her entourage, but she doesn't approach the crypts, she circles with her flowers in hand around the nearest graves, laying her offerings and saying her prayers and keeping with mild and faded grief smile one ear open to the world around her, the mourners shuffling between mourned and the cars hissing past through this warm and benevolent day on which mothers do not die, but plenty of others will.

* * *

Tim is a screamer.

He doesn't want to be, of course, the young ones never do, not with the bluster of youth still rich in his strong back, his blooming cheeks, his steady hand, his conquests of Man's feeble wars asleep beneath his feet, his powers barely tested, his bravery hardly contested, Time and Death and all their black ills grazing but never touching this young lad who like all other infants will be singed by the reaper's sickle but never gashed.

Oh Timothy.

So much still to learn, mate.

With the hope still starry in his eyes, because for a century he has lived, and what other truth does he know?

He inserts the Pear of Anguish gently into Tim's mouth, prying the jaw open, and slipping the metal leaves between his lips.

A careful turn of the screw first, to accommodate this foreignness, to relax the muscles around it and to coax the face as you coax the man, slipping him with such ease into that false hope, here is mercy, and it wears the face of a monster, it breathes with Death's fetid sighs, it has looked upon your wet and trembling lashes and felt with the last of its humanity the faint rumblings of conscience, stirred in the depths of its gut the raw and ragged remnants of Man whose face he dons but has long since forgotten-

And then he cranks those leaves all the way open, and Tim screams, and screams as his cheeks bulge and split all the way back to the ears and the teeth flash their shiny lures to his discerning eye, so that what is there but to reach in and pluck free the closest of them -what a nice pearly one, mate, kept up with your brushing, have we- and hold it up to the floodlight one of his little helpers has arranged in the corner.

He slips the Pear of Anguish from Tim's mouth.

The boy sags on his cross.

"Have you ever read up on any of the torture techniques implemented in the Russian gulags of Stalin's reign?"

Tim spits.

"No?"

He picks up a fire poker from the ground beside the little bonfire a helpful minion lit and left to blaze.

He runs the tip of the poker through the flame, holds it there for a moment, turns it thoughtfully, watches the whole long length of it begin to glow.

"They were very creative. I was quite impressed. It's always interesting, don't you think, the depths to which mortal minds can sink, new as they are to the world and all its depravities?"

He takes the poker from the fire.

He turns round to face the boy, and stands there for a moment, just letting him take this in, his split cheeks fluttering like gills, red all down the front of his shirt, the hands hanging limply by those impaled wrists, and the eyes, ah, the eyes.

Enough to powder the heart of any villain.

A bit like kicking a puppy, torturing this boy.

But.

His hands are tied.

He did try and make away with his brother, after all.

His  _brother_ , Timmy.

Can't you understand what it is to set free what you so long to cradle, and to watch him fly, of course so fast, so far, as all things make their escape from him, to shade your eyes against this distant horizon and stand with careful and frightened heart and think to yourself with your long and knowing years nothing leaves forever,  _nothing_ , not from  _him_  not when he has bent  _everything_ to his vast and unyielding will-

And yet you stand with empty arms.

And you watch your empty arms clutch on nothing because something else has already ensnared what you so long to hold.

So try to see it his way, Tim.

Boy.

He licks his lips.

You see, he plays at apathy.

But did you know-

Did you know he laid his sister to rest and then he sank down amid the sterility of his cold and lonely bed beside neither Caroline nor brother and he put his arm in his mouth to stifle his grief, it was that loud?

He yanks at the boy's trousers, tearing away a button, and what a howl Tim lets out.

He twists and he kicks and he screams his hoarse " _No_!" to the ceiling, the damp walls, the face of this beast who no longer comprehends such clemency.

Shh.

Shhhhh.

He won't tell you it will all be over soon, he won't stay his hand, draw back his weapon, soothe from these thieving fingers the cramps of such long and horrific convulsions.

But he'll kill you first.

Isn't that something?

* * *

She sits down in the grass and tilts her face to the sun as and she listens to the shuffling of the werewolves somewhere far below her feet, and the nervous pattering of that breast that dried the grief of so many stubbed and blackened toes.

She wants you to remember, Mom.

This wasn't always her.

And she's still here, Mom, somewhere, she  _knows_  it, ok, she hasn't been  _lost_ , she isn't  _gone_ , this is just how she has to grow up.

She still gets to do that, believe it or not.

* * *

"I am going to kill you first, if you're worried about that."

Tim, Tim.

Don't be like that.

Just hanging there with all manner of ugliness in your eyes, and the red all in a beard down your chin.

It's rather…ghastly, mate.

"I will make him watch. This isn't about you- surely you know that. I imagine most things aren't about you. Why would they be?"

He sinks back in his chair and gives a little toss of the mobile he has slipped from Tim's pocket.

For a long moment, they stare at one another, the blood with its noisy tap tap tapping in the dust and those blue eyes unblinking, the fingers stirring in their religious stasis, the left boot giving a little jerk, the chest heaving once, twice, and settling once more into its rhythm of shallow habit.

He unlocks the screen of the mobile.

"Of course, you must have some sort of contact number for him in here."

Tim says nothing.

"I could make you give it to me. But I think a bit of a break is in order, don't you?" He scrunches his nose playfully. "Anyway, it shouldn't take long for me to find it- you don't appear to have many friends, Timmy. Isn't that tragic?"

He scrolls without looking away from the boy's eyes. "I suppose that means there'll be no one waiting for you. Over there. But you'll be joined before too long, don't worry." He rubs his chin thoughtfully. "I hope you can find one another over there. Say hello to my father for me. He'll be spending the rest of your eternity murdering and torturing Kol." He lets out a little laugh, and stops on a contact with no name, just the numbers there in neat black, blinking up at him. "Do you know…I'm not up to it myself, mate," he says softly, and holds up the phone.

He taps the number.

They both listen to it ring.

It echoes for a very long time through the little chamber, jumping from wall to wall, the boy flinching with each repeat of it.

"He'll answer. He'll see your number, and for a moment, he'll pray. And then he'll hear my voice."

And so the boy stares and somewhere in the city his brother breathes such a long and heavy sigh and with what wings his relief carries away all the heaviest parts of him, and oh, little brother.

If only you'd uttered his own name with such tenderness.

"Tim? Tim, are you there?"

He smiles.

He sets the phone on his knee and he steeples his fingers.

"He is. I don't suppose you'll take my word for it?"

What a silence, brother.

As if he weren't  _worth_ a single draw on the sky, an infinitesimal inflation of the lung, a sigh, a word, a  _breath_.

He snatches the phone from his knee and rises with fire poker in hand. "I assume you'll recognize his screams, though I'm sure you're used to them in a different context."

"Nik."

He shoves the poker through the side of Tim's knee.

The boy obliges him.

" _Nik_!"

"He's had a bit of a rough day; you might want to hurry. We're out at-"

He hears Tim spit out a mouthful of blood, a bit of tongue, and then down onto his shoulder crashes a slippery hand and from his own fingers the phone sails, and then a loud tear, a creaking of the cross, and he turns round to watch the boy fall, landing clumsily on his stomach, his hands ragged, his boots destroyed, but with what determination he scrambles forward, gargling fear and blood alike, pulling himself through the dirt as he used to watch those battlefield comrades wriggle for their trenches, with missing nails, burned-away stumps, leaking bowels, and still the perseverance of man in them-

He grabs Tim by the ankles and yanks him backward.

"Kol," he calls out. "Tick tock."

He flips Tim onto his back, and the boy spits in his face, one perfect arc right into his eye.

For a moment, he is so stunned by this audacity he drops the feet, he rears back, he stands gaping down at this little submissive who staggers to his feet and makes a blinding dart for the phone.

Tim hurls it hard as he can into the wall.

But let's not amuse him.

He catches it.

"Kol," he says calmly, and wipes his face.

"You have twenty minutes. We're out at the ruins of Fort Macomb. You'll find me fashioning his noose out of his own entrails."

Now that's what he likes to see, mate.

Hope is never so beautiful as when it drains utterly from those white and aged cheeks of the resigned.

* * *

Midnight has long since smudged out the sun when she takes her first step into the crypts, and she crouches just within the entrance listening to the hearts ahead of her.

She doesn't want to say she's channeling Klaus.

She likes to think she's found her own niche, after all.

Because it's always going to be like this: time and its inevitable enemies hacking away at her Achilles heel, because she's made of spun sugar, she smiles at everyone, she will not turn to bite.

She'll have to spin her own myths, and propagate separate whispers.

It's not:  _there's Klaus' girl dear God imagine what he'd do to you a guy like that_.

It's:  _there's Caroline did you hear what happened to the last guy did you know what the smile hides and the spun sugar sweetens?_

There will come a girl like sunshine.

That's how her legend will start.

There will come a girl like sunshine, hair first, poking its rays through the shadows, and the face black as any of Poe's deadliest nights, and the tell-tale heart, boomboomboomboom, not hers, but yours, scurrying away hand in hand with your imagination as you think is that blood on a face like that underneath hair like that is that blood all down the chin and onto the throat-

And she'll say yes, and smile very sweetly.

She'll want you to know.

And your friends and your friends' friends and their friends' friends, and on down the grapevine so that you understand, you understand, you see this woman, that's Elizabeth Forbes, mother of Caroline, and she's not to be touched- she'll need you all to  _understand_.

Ok?

The first guy is twice her size, and carrying a gun, and it just doesn't matter.

She sinks her teeth into his throat and bites halfway through to his spine.

And the blood drip drips down her chin and the guy blinks once as he sags, a last little death pang, goodbye cruel world, my name was Whatever, and I stole a girl's mother.

And you know girls.

So touchy about everything.

Must be that time of the month.

She takes one of the smoke grenades from her pocket.

She holds it down by her side as she walks, that svelte little wiggle in her hips, the pin tinking on the floor, the grenade clank clanking as it rolls, that deadly curiosity rearing its ugly head even with the story of the cat like a gazillion  _gazillion_ years old.

Three of them come sauntering down the hall.

And of course the smoke swallows them, and they back away hissing, or stumble into each other, and bend over to clean the rheum from their eyes, coughing like they're dying, and blindly pulling their weapons because they too are creatures of instinct, and they can feel her coming, she's a little knot in their chests, and a roiling in their stomachs, she is the nausea on their tongue and the unsteadiness in their hands, but she's not so bad.

She even lets one of them get off a shot.

And then she looms.

Straight out of the fog, hair shining where the moon cannot see.

And he might be busy being a gigantic jerk face right now, stewing in his own mopey bullshit, and on his fingers ticking off all the ways she and the world have wronged him-

But he'd be so, so proud.

* * *

Tim is hanging limply from Nik's idea of a clever little joke.

His healing wounds still weep pathetically here and there, getting in their last little trickles, but mostly he's whole, mostly he's hale-

But oh, Nik.

The things you've put in his eyes.

They stare at one another for a moment, Tim's chin on his chest, the fingers of his left hand jerking in this little fluttering wave, blood on everything which seeps, his eyelashes matted, his shirt soaked, trousers spattered, the cheeks with their own crust of red in place of beard-

He understands what Nik's saying.

If he takes this in with his blurry eyes and he feels it prickle in his heart and still he turns, and he walks away to leave this boy to fight not another day, he passes the test, he is accepted back into the fold, he is once more deserving not, perhaps, of love, but those choice little scraps which sometimes resemble it, tossed here and there about the centuries.

But he always picks you Nik.

He died, and it didn't change anything, Nik.

You see: he knew it wouldn't.

He was hoping when you sat down in the Gilberts' living room and dropped your head so helplessly into your hands, it was all your biggest regrets, coming back up like bile.

That maybe you'd think of him and wish-

If I'd only done it differently.

If it all didn't have to be about me.

But he sees.

He did before.

He's just still so young sometimes, imagine that.

He can care about anyone he likes, as long as it's you, and go anywhere he pleases, as long as he hasn't run out of leash, and pulled his collar taut.

So what if there was a witch.

She was only a dead girl among some trees.

And so what if there's a boy.

He is only a casualty for the years.

You probably knew how this was going to end, Nik.

You always win.

But he died too many times.

And for a while he sat with the dead girl among some trees and he watched you move on without him, and any prattling moralist would disagree, but he deserved better.

So he crosses the chamber in a step.

He jerks poor Tim's right hand down off that cross and takes his weight as down flops the other arm over his shoulder, and then off come the boots, the nail squelching past Tim's toes, and tightening every finger that's dug into his shoulder, and pushing up his throat something like a hiccup or a sob.

He eases them both down onto their knees.

He buries his face in Tim's hat, and holds him with his eyes shut, and he hopes Nik, he  _prays_ you're watching, and there's something of his brother left after all, and he can't look on all this, without thinking look at the  _face_ he makes, his little brother, all wrapped up in this mess of a man.

"You stupid fuck. You stupid  _fuck_ ," Tim says into his shoulder. "He's going to kill you."

And maybe he will.

Maybe he's nothing to you without his bridle and his lead, Nik.

But please don't-

Please don't let that be the last thing he understands.

He pulls Tim's head off his shoulder.

"He's still hanging round here. I don't know where he is, but he's still here, Kol. It's a trap, you fucker," he chokes out, and stumbles on that, his voice cracking.

"I know, darling. Look at me, Tim. Look at me, ok?"

He holds Tim's face gently, and rubs some of the blood from his cheeks with his thumb. "You're going to run as soon as you get the chance, all right?"

"No," he says, and shakes his head very quickly, looking down, and trying not to let his tears out into his eyelashes, where there's hardly room for them.

"Yeah. Fast as you can."

"Not by meself."

"Yes. By yourself. Till I can catch up. Just run. I want you to put…miles between us. As many as you can get, all right?" he asks, giving Tim a little shake to punctuate this, and then there Nik is, right behind him, crowding out everything else in this room, his brother's presence takes up that much space- Tim's heartbeat, his thundering own, all of it superimposed by Nik, as most things are.

He gets up carefully, leaving Tim on his knees, so that he's no threat, not of flight, or brotherhood, just a boy, kneeling as so many of his brother' victims make their last obeisance.

Nik looks stricken.

He looks small and unshaven and sunken-eyed, and you know, he forgets, how his brother is mostly a name.

Whisper, O scribes, the hushed syllable of Him, and unravel him in beastly wings and dragon's teeth through your sonnets, and paint his lips in mother's blood and children's souls.

But remember, he's only a brother.

He knows it's so easy to forget.

But his arms are warm, and his hands tender when he forgets himself, and for a moment loosens the shackles of his myth.

"Nik," he says, and his brother's whole face shifts, and he knows that change, he's seen what it heralds, so he leaps first, into a right cross that knocks Nik's jaw askew and stumbles him back three steps into the wall behind him.

" _Run_!" he screams, and he twists Nik's arm behind his back and throws him headfirst into this wall and for a moment he locks them here, his chest to Nik's spine, Nik's nose flat against the wall, and there goes Tim with a soft _whoosh_ and a flutter of air against his neck, and half a second of his relieved heart in his throat and then Nik kicks back into his kneecap and with a wet crunch the whole bloody thing folds beneath him.

He takes a blow to the chin, another to the solar plexus, on his knees now, the ruined one still crick cracking itself back into place, the inhale he tries to take half the size he meant it to be, and sticking on something, but he drives an elbow hard as he can up into Nik's cock, so that he keels over with a little gasp, clutching himself, quite the big man now, aren't you, big brother, your eyes wide as dinner plates, and his first shot still smearing you to the chin-

He scrambles to his feet, bounces Nik's forehead off his knee, heaves him into that wall once more, listens to the snap of whatever he's broken, and the cry that accompanies it, and now Nik just sags, and flops right over backward, so that he's nowhere to look but up, into his victor's face.

"You little  _shit_ ," he snaps, making a great desperate grab for those words, pulling them up out of the very core of him, where everything is rough and unfinished, so that Nik can't help but fucking  _understand_ , because that's all he bloody  _wanted_.

Just for you to look, you tit, and realize, ah yes, what a prick I'm being.

And still he loves me.

Perhaps I should leave off  _shitting_ all over that.

"We're both being butthurt  _cunts_ , Nik. We could have hashed it out. We could have hashed it out- you didn't have to drag him into it. I didn't lay a  _finger_ on Caroline, Nik." He holds out his arms to either side. "Every time- every time one of us finds something that's not you, and we're happy, you have to punish us for it. So get up. Get  _up_ , Nik."

"And what are you going to do, little brother?"

"Beat the shit out of you, like brothers do when they're fed up with one another's asshole face."

Nik's smile reminds him of Mikael.

He drops his arms, and lowers his voice. "I just want us to punch one another for a while…and then go out for a drink together. I'm not here because I hate you, Nik."

"You're not here for me at all," Nik says tonelessly, and jerks his legs out from underneath him.

He knocks his head on the ground, and rolls to the side, but Nik has got him by the ankle now, and it cracks in his hand, and a blast of stars before his eyes and a scream that echoes off the walls and Nik is suddenly astride him, hands round his throat, and the walls and the ceiling flicker and another crack like a rifle shot and he realizes its his head going all slushy against the ground as Nik bangs it once, twice, his eyes yellow with his fury, and he tries a slap to Nik's head that dislodges nothing, and now another, flailing away with all the last strength in his limp and oxygenless arms, but Nik bears down, bears down, and the last fight in him trickles down into his feet that twitch and scrabble in the dirt-

And here's where his heart quails, and he realizes half his blood is Nik's, but it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, what's a little fratricide between men such as them, and anyway it's only Kol, he went away once, nobody missed him.

He hears another crack, something he can't feel through this veil of black, and the rushing of the Other Side full in his roaring roaring ears as Nik eyes his chest and thinks so that you can see it all scrawled across his face thick as his veins there's his heart, and it's only Kol's, it's only bloody  _Kol's_ , and Nik's hands press into his neck and the ceiling blackens above him and the last of the spasms makes its way through his foot and into the dirt, so he'll have a complacent victim at least, you like those, Nik, don't you, something cowed beneath your mass-

And then Tim rears up behind his brother with a piece of that cross in his hand, and swings it into Nik's temple like he's aiming for home.

One of those hands slips, Nik's head spurts, Tim takes a breath like a drowning man, and down the board comes again.

And then he just starts to bang away.

No artistry to it, just the arm and board coming down, Tim's face contorted beneath all that blood, Nik's head snapping forward with each blow, and pieces of his brother raining down on him, and the hand at his throat loosening in gradual increments, first the relaxation of the thumb and then the slight tic of the forefinger, and all the while Tim, poor Tim not right in the eyes, hammering and hammering and  _hammering_ , sweat flying, his heart in a marathon flurry-

And through blood and brain, half his head blown out, and the remnants just streaming down onto his shoulders, onto his spine, Nik smiles.

He reaches back to snap Tim's wrist like a twig as it swings down once more.

But he keeps hold of the board, he keeps hold of the board and bashes Nik another one, side of the temple this time, little slivers of skull spraying his own face and the hot gush of his brother's blood on his belly and all the rolling echoes of this just jumping and jumping from wall to wall, Tim sobbing for breath and Nik bleeding onto his face and the scurrying of his toes still digging about in the dirt for some kind of purchase, that hand not yet slack enough for breath, for a real breath full in the lungs, full in the belly, thawing the death from his arms and his legs-

And another smile and another tic of the forefinger and he takes his first gasp-

Constellations of red in his eyes, in his head, and crack goes that board one more time, and Nik's head pitches forward its final wobbling time and then his chest goes suddenly light, and half a second, half a bloody  _second_ , it's all the faster he had to be, but he doesn't make it, he blurs for Nik's arm and Nik jerks it just beyond his reach and turns with his spongy head healing its worst patches of mangled skull, peeping brain, and pins Tim one-handed to the wall by the heart.

* * *

"Mom," she whispers.

And Liz has to think about it, she sees.

Whether this is her daughter at all, with the red chin, and the perfect hair, and the bodies in their prostrate deference at her feet.

She wipes some of the blood away with the cuff of her jacket sleeve and mom, mommy-

It was only supposed to be them, looking at her that way.

But then Liz asks, "Are you ok, honey?" in a voice a little unsteady, a little unsure, she birthed this girl and she dressed her up in ribbons, after all, and held onto the seat of her bike until she could pedal all the way to the end of the driveway without that hand, but she asks it, and she  _means_ it, and that's all-

That's all she needed.

You don't have to give her much.

"I'm fine, Mom. Here; take this," she says, and hands her mom the little revolver she stole from Klaus', and Liz checks the chamber, clicks it shut, tucks it into the back of her waistband.

She hears Tyler and another half a dozen wolves, making their way down one of the side corridors, and she puts her mom behind her and stands with both her feet planted and the blood drying on her chin and beneath her nails and then in the nearest doorway he appears, looking from the bodies at her feet to her face like she's dug something so deep into him, and pulled out everything he needs.

"Caroline," he whispers, still looking at these people who were probably his friends, and you'll see the blood, and the eyes, and think this is not a girl, this is the shadow she casts before her.

And maybe you'd be right.

But still she's sorry.

* * *

" _Nik_!"

Tim drops to his knees with Nik to the forearm in him.

"Nik,  _stop_."

Everything stuffed into this one long moment of Tim's wet gurgle and Nik's set jaw, something pounding so loud in his ears, his heart, his heart he's never heard it so noisy, not since he crouched waiting for his first deer and he listened to his nerves amplify each fallen leaf and all the soft and crackling undergrowth of a planet always on the move, and the breathing, he remembers that most of all, the breathing of Nik beside him, in, out, just like silk, nothing like this ragged trio of thwarted brother and petrified lover.

"I was going to let him go, Kol," Nik says in something tremulous and fractured that is not his voice, not his big brother's sing-song death dirge, and he gets so carefully, so bloody  _carefully_ to his feet.

"You still can Nik," he replies just as calmly as he can, with both his hands out.

"How can I? How else do I get you to pick me, unless there's nothing else?"

He takes a breath, edges to the side with his hands still out, so that Nik can see he's making no sudden movements, he's here, he's just here, that's what matters, that's what you wanted, and don't move Tim, God not a bloody _breath_ , Tim, do you understand-

He doesn't cut his eyes that way, he keeps them on Nik, he edges round just a little closer, from the side, so that Nik has to keep him in his peripheral vision, so that he has to pick, brother or victim, at which will he look, is it his hate or his love with the stronger tug-

Easy,  _easy_ Tim, goddammit, get the air down however you can, darling, but don't stir so much as a hair on the back of Nik's hand, Tim,  _please_ -

"Nik," he says quietly, still tip-toeing his way round between them, easy, easy, heel to toe, just as his brother taught him so very long ago. "Nik, what if it was Caroline? What if it was Caroline, Nik?" he asks, and that name changes everything about his brother.

Hats off to you, darling.

To just sag the most powerful of them all with nothing at all.

"It doesn't matter," Nik says hoarsely. "She was wrong about me. She's very young, you know, little brother. And she'll see. Perhaps she already has. But I was, Kol. I was going to let him go. For you."

"You can still do that, Nik."

Nik adjusts his grip, his jaw flexes, his Adam's apple makes the jump to just below the jaw.

"But how can I? Everything you've done, everything he's done-"

"You could do it because you love me. I hope," he says, a little strained, still not letting himself look at Tim, heel-toeing his way carefully round so that he's nearly within arm's length, his hands still outstretched. "What's more important to you? Your reputation or your brother?"

Nik looks at him.

He keeps his eyes squarely on Nik, and he takes another step, nervously curling his fingers in to wipe their sweat on his palms, just easing himself along like this is a wild animal to be coaxed from its corner, not a brother but something mad, something feral, something with throats in its teeth and instinct in its belly. "Nik," he says softly, softly, something of the old them in it, nights under the moon and stories in bed, both their first broken hearts-

And he's running that all through his own brain, is Nik, turning it over, and staring at him like he sees something worth thinking about, and that arm sags just a little, and Tim's mouth opens not on another gush of blood but a full breath, a shaky one, but a thing to stretch his belly, and good, good, yes, Nik, you see, he knew you could, it's why he always came back, there will always, always be something left of the moonlight, and the stories, and the boy who cared about them both, cared about his eternal sharer of moons, sharer of tales, nipping along at his heels like a puppy, and bouncing at the front of his horse-

Tim takes another damp breath, Nik's forearm flexes, there is a flutter of those long and matted eyelashes, a trickle of red over his bottom lip, and he stops, he says, " _Nik_ " like it's a prayer, and his brother croaks out, "I'm sorry, I'm  _sorry_ ," and it's so rare, so  _bloody_ rare, he ought to fold this moment up, and slip it away into the last and fast-vanishing warmth of him, where he keeps all his nicest things, but Nik's face contorts, his forearm flexes once more, there's a thicker trickle, a longer breath, and Nik,  _Jesus_ , Nik, you never could just leave it there, could you-

* * *

"Caroline," he says numbly.

"All you have to do is let us leave, Tyler. And not hurt my mother. That's all I'm here for."

The girl beside him spies someone on the floor and puts her face in her hands and her knees on the floor, and she just spills out  _everything_ , and it's like she's standing here with her red face and her red hands witnessing the first grief in the first heart of the first man, it hits her that hard.

She knows, ok?

What it's like to be there on that floor, just vomiting feelings, you've got so many of them.

But you have to understand.

Sometimes she can't just be a girl.

When she's going to live forever-

You understand that, don't you?

That there will come another day and another enemy and if she is only something to make her mother proud, it'll be her, not you.

"Little vampire  _whore_ ," one of the men beside Tyler snaps, and pulls his gun.

"Jake, don't!" Tyler roars, and knocks the gun spinning from his hand, but then the girl on her knees, she screams, " _No_!" from deep in her belly, and she pulls her own, and she's not quite fast enough to make it to her before she takes the shot, but she does keep it from her mother, she does let it smash through her own shoulder, and lodge there in the bone, burning so badly, but it's ok, it's ok, she's got her breath, she steadies her legs, she backhands the pistol from the girl's hand.

"Tyler!" her mom says from behind her, in her most authoritative cop voice, and she turns from the girl curled in a ball at her feet, and she sees her mom with that gun in her hands, and her blackest mama bear grimace on her face. "Call them off. Let my daughter go."

"No!" the girl screams. "She killed Dane!  _She killed Dane_ , Tyler!"

"You kidnapped my  _mom_ , Tyler!" she screams right back, and her voice cracks. "What did you think I was going to do, to get her back?" she asks more quietly, and lifts her shaking hands to brush them back through her hair.

"This wasn't what I wanted, Caroline," he tells her, and he is so, so sorry, she can hear that in his voice, he just came down on the other side of the line, and if all is not fair in love and war, he wanted it to be.

"Tyler," her mom says again, that revolver still out in front of her, her legs splayed in her steady gunman's stance. "Let Caroline and I leave, and she won't hurt anyone else."

"She killed  _five_ of us," someone pipes up from behind Tyler. "How can you say that?"

"Because she's my daughter. And she's better than that. She was protecting me. You broke into my home, you  _kidnapped_ me, and then you threatened my daughter with her own mother. What would you have done?" she asks quietly, and for a moment she thinks they're considering this, and eyeing her with new understanding, and then one of them fires, and his shaking hands spoil his shot, but her mom's is dead-on, just like always, and she drills a neat red hole between the eyes of this boy who tried to murder her daughter.

* * *

Nik's hand emerges without Tim's heart.

And they all eye one another, Nik most stunned of all.

He slips between them in a flash, and shoves Nik back as he's studying his hand like it's of its own mind, and his brother stumbles, he sits down hard in the dirt and the blood, he doesn't get back up.

He keeps himself between them, but Nik's just sitting there, all loose, hovering between that strange and shimmery blur of laughter or tears, staring down at his hands like they've wronged him.

His brother is sad.

That's what it is.

Not a god, not a man, just one more huddling mass in the dust.

You don't often see how pathetic he is, draped in his name, chest-swelled, dimple-cheeked, pressing flat everything which fits underneath his boot, and it's everything, he made sure of that, to be foot and not ant, it's all the world and all its ills and most of all Nik the boy, Nik the brother-

But he's sad.

Not in the way that gods or men are sad, but monsters in deep dragon lairs of hoarded company, snacking on men who won't be his friends.

He looks down at him as Tim gets shakily to his feet.

"I'm going to leave, Nik," he says quietly, and his brother glances up from his hands. "I'm going to leave, and you're not going to hurt Tim, and you're not going to hurt me. You're going to let me go. You're going to let me choose. And I'll come back and visit you, I'll always come back- when I want to."

Nik blinks.

His bottom lip trembles.

"But we're done dancing round this. Me always playing at being free, and you letting me think that, so long as I don't step outside your rules, and find someone who isn't you. I died, Nik. And I thought maybe it would mean more to you or you'd gain some…new perspective on what it means, losing people. And how holding on too tightly isn't the way do to it. But it's the same. It's just the same, Nik. So I'm letting go. And if you come after me- I'll kill you." He lifts his hands, lets them fall. "Please don't make me do that," he whispers.

And then he turns his back.

And his first step is the hardest.

Nik calls out for him like a child.

He grabs Tim's elbow.

He doesn't look back.

There was a Kol who couldn't have done it.

There was a Kol without a witch, without a boy, without the fresh perspective of that third and final death, and he couldn't have done it.

But this one just keeps walking.

* * *

He has reached the foyer with the white oak stake in his hand when Elijah appears, dagger in hand, disheveled Bekah at his side, and demands of him, "Niklaus, what are you doing?"

Bekah sees it first, and screams, and hurls herself at him, leave him alone,  _leave him alone_ ,  _Nik_ , she orders, she  _beseeches_ , but spend your breath on neither, sister.

What a waste of your time.

And who knows, sister dear, Bekah darling, how much of it you have left?

He slams her into the wall one-handed when she lunges for the stake, and he holds it poised at her throat, that white and heaving hollow jerking instinctively back from the tip, Elijah with his cold and tight authority ordering him to step away, so  _make him_ , big brother,  _force his hand_ , bend his knee,  _he bloody dares you_ -

Bekah stands so still, breathing his own jerky rasps, and that hand at her throat shaking like an innocent's, the blood surging in his veins, and he hears himself roughly declare he doesn't have time for this, and watches the hand at her throat lower, and Caroline, love, if you could see him now, and judge him with new and childlike heart, he thinks, and vanishes out the door.

* * *

She doesn't beat the next bullet.

That's what she'll never forget.

Mom scrambles for cover behind the wall and she flips the boy who returns her shot onto his back, and breaks his neck with a stomp of her foot, but there's another, she sees him out of the corner of her eye but she's still stomping, she's still listening to that last and fatal crack, and feeling the tingle of it in her fangs, so this other boy, he swings around with his pistol, and he blows her mother's brains across her face.

* * *

He tucks the stake into his jacket as he walks.

See what happens, brother, when you rise above your station, and think to your high and mighty self, of course I may choose another, and live happily without my brother, who is nothing anyway, less than a man, less than a monster, pathetic,  _malleable_ , swayed by a few earnest and pretty words-

Did you think-

Did you ever think-

Of course he can't let you  _leave_ , not like this, not with some pale replacement at your side, where you may transfer everything he was just- he was just hoping-

You'd feel for him.

Of course he doesn't deserve it.

Of course he never deserved it.

Of course Caroline is an anomaly, a glitch, a miracle, and some day-

Some day.

But of course you know how that ends, Kol.

He drops to his knees in the middle of the sidewalk and puts his face in his hands, and look, oh knowledgeable Time, how the mighty have fallen.

But then you must have seen this coming.

Oh, Caroline, Caroline.

What a man for your side, love, bawling like a child with the tourists skirting warily round him.

* * *

They splatter her hair, and drip down into her mouth, and she doesn't  _think_ she doesn't  _cry_ she just reaches out, she snaps this boy, she head butts Tyler when he makes a lunge for her and it's so easy reaching into his chest, and bringing out this soft and wriggling thing that might still be alive, it's that red, it's that warm, and she has one brief moment of Tyler,  _Tyler_ , and then someone shoots her, she feels the impact, she feels the hot burning of it in her arm, in her stomach, half a dozen, everyone left opening fire, staggering before this onslaught, acid veins, nuclear chest, and through it all Mom Mom  _Mom_ because it's wearing off, it's burning away, she had one arctic moment of ice-numb clarity where she wasn't sad, she wasn't angry, she wasn't anything, just an animal, just an animal but now she tastes her  _Mom_ that's her  _Mom_ in her hair over her face down her throat-

She kicks off the wall, smacks a gun from the nearest fingers, puts her hand through the throat of the girl who aims it, pulls out what must be the voice box, what must be the windpipe, links of white, sponge of pink-

And onto the next with their bullets dragging her down but she's still so fast, she's still so  _fast_  and she didn't  _stop it_ , Mom-

So many screams- so many screams and her fangs pricking her lip and her mother's blood warm in her belly same as the rest same as the boy with the red hair and the girl with the green eyes just a bunch of human waste that will be digested with her quick and able monster's enzymes worse than dust worse than dust you're just  _nothing_ -

Look at this  _look at this_  all these little ribbons and bones and things that squish between her fingers and she pulls she pulls and it just keeps coming out do you think she cares  _if it hurts_ -

They plead they plead they  _plead_ oh mercy, right, because she looks like a girl, she looks like a girl there's blood in her hair but still it's blonde still it shines and the polish on her nails it's Cotton Candy Pink but look at her face _look at her face_ -

Your heart and your head and you,  _you_ , she'll take  _everything_ , she'll lick you from her fingers and splatter your friend against the wall and maybe this girl crying under her heel maybe she was your girlfriend and she loved like someone she used to know, like someone who had a  _mother_ , like someone who doesn't understand, who  _doesn't understand_ -

Now she doesn't?

There was a breast that always welcomed her wet and gibbering dramas, and now there isn't?

She drops the boy in her hand.

She looks around.

There's the boy her mother shot, there's the boy beside him, and the one beside him, and the girl who screamed for Dane, and there's Tyler, and her mother, and there's her, and a heartbeat.

Just one.

And drip drip drip from the ceiling and drip drip drip from the walls and drip drip drip from her hands.

And drip drip drip from her mouth of mommy's last.


End file.
